Summary
- Glencar has begun piling for the West Shell of Pure DC's 70MW LON01B2 facility.
- The phase adds more than 23,000 square metres and will take the campus to 90MW.
- B2 completion is scheduled for Q2 2029 while construction proceeds beside live capacity.
Pure DC has started the final major construction phase of its LON01 Brent Cross campus in North London, with Glencar beginning piling for the West Shell of the 70MW LON01B2 facility.
The work will add more than 23,000 square metres to the development and bring total campus capacity to 90MW. Pure DC says completion of the wider B2 facility is scheduled for the second quarter of 2029, extending a development programme valued by the operator at more than £1 billion.
Glencar’s current scope covers the West Cold Shell, including piling and foundations, underground services, structural framing and connections to the adjacent East Cold Shell, concrete and slab works, stair cores, the building envelope, and roofing. Those works are being carried out while the wider campus remains operational.
That live-site condition adds a layer of complexity that is easy to overlook in headline capacity figures. Construction traffic, lifting operations, temporary works, utilities, commissioning activity, and fit-out all have to be coordinated around infrastructure whose purpose is uninterrupted operation. A data centre expansion cannot treat the existing facility as an empty neighbouring building site.
Pure DC says LON01 is designed as a closed-loop, liquid-cooled facility capable of supporting high-density AI inference and cloud workloads. The cooling architecture reflects the way new compute densities are changing the physical specification of large campuses: thermal design now has to be considered alongside electrical capacity from the outset rather than added after the IT load is fixed.
A 70MW building is also a substantial construction programme in its own right. The shell has to accommodate the electrical and mechanical systems required to turn utility power into conditioned power at rack level, remove heat continuously, maintain redundancy, and provide maintainable routes through the building for equipment that will be replaced several times over the life of the structure.
The Brent Cross programme shows how long the delivery cycle can become even once a site is established. Piling is beginning in 2026, while completion of the wider B2 facility is scheduled almost three years later. Data centre demand can change rapidly over that period, but foundations, structural steel, switchgear, cooling plant, substations, testing, and commissioning still move according to physical construction and equipment lead times.
Pure DC has also specified recycled steel and lower-carbon components in the development. After completion, B2 is due to carry a living wall of more than 750,000 plants, intended to reduce noise and air pollution and support biodiversity beside the Brent Reservoir Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Those features sit around the central engineering requirement rather than replacing it: the building has to support a 70MW critical load reliably within a constrained London site. Brent Cross is one of the places where the growth of digital infrastructure meets the practical limits of dense urban development — power availability, construction logistics, local environmental conditions, and the need to build beside operating capacity.
Reaching the piling stage does not remove those constraints, but it moves LON01B2 from design and enabling work into the structural phase. The next milestones will be less visible than the headline 90MW campus figure: completing the shell, integrating the building with the existing site, installing the critical systems, and commissioning them without compromising the live operation around them.
