Telehouse Buys £220m Docklands Site With 65MVA

Telehouse Europe, the London data-centre operator owned by Japan’s KDDI, has bought a site next to its Docklands campus in east London and secured 65MVA of power for a new data centre aimed at AI workloads. Telehouse said in its own release on 29 October that it had paid “more than £220 million (US$294 million)” for the Inventory Estate in East India Dock.

KDDI’s release, published in Japanese the same day, puts the price at about ¥47 billion. It says the new power supply will lift Telehouse’s total grid capacity in London about 1.8 times.

What Telehouse bought

The site was sold by LaSalle Investment Management and Trilogy Real Estate, according to Telehouse. The company plans “a new high-density, AI-ready data centre” there, offering high-density colocation, low-latency connections and capacity for AI workloads. KDDI says the building will be designed to host high-performance GPU servers with high-capacity, low-latency network links.

The 65MVA figure is power receiving capacity, the amount of electricity the site can draw from the grid, rather than the computing load the finished building will carry. Telehouse calls it “a foundation for phased, long-term expansion”. KDDI’s footnote gives the arithmetic: Telehouse’s London sites in operation today have 77.6MVA, so adding 65MVA takes the total to about 1.8 times that level. That comparison leaves out Telehouse West Two, which is still being built.

Neither company has given a construction date or a building cost for the new data centre, or said how many megawatts of IT equipment it will hold.

Next in line after West Two

The new building will follow Telehouse West Two, a nine-storey data centre already under way on the campus. KDDI says West Two is due to open in its 2027 fiscal year, which runs to March 2028; Telehouse’s release says it is “due for completion in 2028”.

Mark Pestridge, managing director of Telehouse Europe, said the purchase “provides space for future expansion to support our customers’ digital growth ambitions”. Takayo Takamuro, Telehouse’s European chief executive, said: “The new data centre will be one of the largest facilities in the Telehouse London Docklands campus, reinforcing its role as the leading connectivity hub in Europe.”

The Docklands campus is about 6km from the City of London. KDDI says it opened Telehouse North there in 1990 as Europe’s first purpose-built colocation data centre and now runs five buildings on the site. The campus has been home to the London Internet Exchange (LINX), where networks swap traffic, since 1994. KDDI says the campus runs on 100% renewable electricity and ranks first in the world for connectivity, measured by customer interconnections in PeeringDB data from October 2026.

The deal follows expansions by KDDI’s data-centre arm in Frankfurt, Paris and Bangkok. Telehouse operates more than 45 sites in more than 10 countries and serves over 3,000 companies, KDDI says. The group has also been busy at home this month, with a robotics venture and drone delivery plans in Japan.

Power, not floor space, is the scarce asset

The useful detail in both releases is that the headline number is power, not square feet. Telehouse says it wants to meet demand “amid increasing constraints on land and power”, and buying a plot that already comes with 65MVA means it does not have to start a new grid application from scratch.

That matters more after the government’s new Data Centre Covenant, which sets five tests the biggest new sites must pass to get help with grid connections. A site attached to an existing campus, with power already secured, is in a stronger position than a greenfield plan waiting in the queue.

Location is the other asset. AI inference, where trained models answer users’ requests, benefits from sitting close to networks and customers, and Docklands is where many of London’s networks already meet. Investors are paying for that kind of position across the UK market, as CBRE’s £460m deal for Onnec showed earlier this month.

What remains open is how much computing the site will actually hold and when. The next useful signal will be a planning or construction timetable from Telehouse.