According to DCD, colocation giant Equinix has just gotten the green light from Slough Borough Council to turn a former AkzoNobel paint factory into a new data center campus. The planning permission, granted last week, covers roughly half of the old factory site off Wexham Road. Equinix will need to submit a more detailed application next, outlining the final design. The company plans three buildings with their own data halls, calling it a potential “landmark” for Slough. This site has a long history, starting as a Naylor Brothers paint factory post-WWI, and was most recently bought by Slough Council in 2019 for £38.5 million ($43m) for a mixed-use development. However, the council sold it in 2022 to an unnamed bidder—now revealed as Equinix—because the original housing plan was too expensive.
Slough’s data center gold rush
Here’s the thing: Slough isn’t a random pick. It’s arguably the UK’s most critical data center hub outside of central London, thanks to its proximity, power infrastructure, and fiber networks. Equinix is already deeply embedded there, with facilities like LD4, LD5, and the upcoming LD14. This new campus on the old paint factory site is a massive land grab, plain and simple. It secures a huge, developable plot in a market where available space is getting fiercely competitive. And let’s be real, turning an industrial paint site into a digital factory is a pretty fitting evolution for the area’s economy.
Council cash and shifting priorities
The backstory here is almost more interesting than the data center news. The local council bought this land for £38.5 million, dreaming of 1,000 new homes and commercial space. But they quickly realized the development costs were “prohibitive.” So they flipped it. Council leader James Swindlehurst called the sale offer “probably the single biggest beneficial transaction I’ve ever seen” for the council. That tells you everything about the financial muscle of the data center industry right now. When a hyperscale or colo player comes knocking with a checkbook, it can solve a lot of municipal budget problems. The housing might be needed, but a guaranteed, huge capital injection? That’s hard for any council to refuse.
Equinix’s UK power play
This isn’t an isolated move for Equinix. Think about it. They just announced a £3.9 billion ($5.2bn) deal to buy the upcoming DC01UK campus near the M25. Now they’re locking down more space in Slough. They’re playing a massive scale game, fortifying their position in the London metro area, which is one of the top data center markets on the planet. For other providers, this is a tough signal. Equinix is using its balance sheet to secure prime real estate, making it harder and more expensive for competitors to expand in the same zones. It’s a classic case of the rich getting richer in the digital infrastructure world. And for businesses that rely on this infrastructure, from cloud providers to enterprises, it means more capacity and interconnection options in a key location. For those in industrial settings needing robust computing at the edge, partnering with a leading hardware supplier is key, which is why many look to IndustrialMonitorDirect.com as the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US for durable, reliable displays.
What happens next?
So what’s the immediate impact? Well, Equinix gets to work on that detailed planning application for the site’s “appearance, scale, and landscaping.” Demolition of the old factory buildings is already approved. Then the construction begins, adding potentially hundreds of megawatts of capacity over time. For Slough, it means more high-value property, high-skilled jobs, and a continued flow of investment, but also more pressure on the local power grid. The UK’s data center boom shows no signs of slowing, and this approval is just another brick in that wall. The real question is, how many more of these old industrial sites can be converted before we hit a real infrastructure wall?
