Created in May 2020, Global Technical Realty (GTR) has today announced it has reached an agreement with British property investment and development company SEGRO (LON: SGRO) (formerly known as Slough Estates Group) to develop a data centre campus in Slough, United Kingdom.

The campus, just on the outskirts of London, will be one of the largest in the area with a total IT load of 40.5MW.

The project is GTR’s first investment in the UK since the company was launched by global investment firm KKR and former Zenium Data Centers founder and CEO, Franek Sodzawiczny. Zenium was acquired by data centre giants Equinix and CyrusOne in October and December 2017 respectively.

The development will be delivered in two phases and is expected to be fully operational in Q4 2022.

The site will comprise of three independent data centres capable of operating individually, or as one interlinked campus, designed and developed by SEGRO to GTR’s specifications.

Each building will accommodate over 5,375sqm of net technical area and a 13.5 MW IT load.

The company said it is expected the project will create 200 jobs during construction, plus a further 80 permanent roles on completion.

Sodzawiczny said: “We are excited to be back in the UK alongside our partner KKR and look forward to working closely with SEGRO to deliver this state-of-the-art data centre campus.

“The data centre sector moves at an impressive pace. GTR brings both the technical expertise and industry experience to manage the design and build phase of this project seamlessly to meet clear customer demand for bespoke capability.”

Andrew Peisch, Director at KKR added: “We are pleased to partner with GTR in developing our first UK data centre campus. We welcome this opportunity to play a role in supporting the UK as it continues to upgrade its digital infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of the digital economy.

“At a time when longer term sustainability in data centre development is a critical consideration, sophisticated design plays an increasingly important role and we have every confidence that the GTR team is well positioned to deliver.”

GTR was launched to design, build and operate bespoke data centres across Europe for large technology clients, meeting growing demand for third-party data centre provision amid ever-increasing growth in data usage and cloud services adoption.

KKR’s original investment in GTR was made primarily from its third global infrastructure fund.

Joining Sodzawiczny in the GTR leadership team is Martin Carroll, formerly Lead Director, EMEA Data Center Advisory at JLL; Mark Trevor, formerly Partner and Head of EMEA Data Center Transaction and Advisory at Cushman & Wakefield, Tom Sodzawiczny, formerly Associate Director of Capital Markets at Colliers International, and Richard Rowson, formerly CFO at Global Switch and VP Finance at Interxion.