Summary
- The first Hertfordshire site is planned to open at 8MW and expand to 38MW.
- Five further UK locations representing 150MW have already been secured.
- Civo's wider plan envisages 40 sites with a combined 1GW of capacity.
Civo is fitting out an 8MW data centre in Hertfordshire that it plans to expand to 38MW as the first physical site in a proposed 40 location UK network.
The company intends the wider programme to deliver a combined 1GW of capacity.
Five additional locations representing 150MW have already been secured in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London, and Oxfordshire.
The remaining sites are planned over the next three years.
The Hertfordshire building is currently in fit out and is intended to open at 8MW before expanding on the same plot to 38MW.
A 38MW facility would be large by conventional edge standards.
Edge deployments have historically used smaller installations to place compute and connectivity closer to users. AI inference can preserve the geographic logic while increasing the electrical and thermal load at each location.
Civo says all planned facilities will support direct to chip liquid cooling and high performance GPU workloads.
The company has linked the design to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin generation and uses computational fluid dynamics modelling to assess thermal behaviour before equipment is installed.
Dense accelerator racks move more heat into a smaller physical footprint than conventional enterprise equipment.
Direct to chip cooling transfers much of that heat into liquid, but the facility still needs coolant distribution units, pumps, pipework, heat exchangers, and central heat rejection equipment capable of handling the load.
Replicating the design across 40 locations introduces a different delivery challenge from concentrating the same capacity in one campus.
Standard designs can reduce engineering work, but every site still requires planning consent, electrical capacity, fibre, maintenance access, construction labour, and a workable commissioning programme.
An 8MW load can already be substantial for a local distribution network. Expanding the same site to 38MW may require different substations, feeders, or upstream reinforcement.
Civo has not disclosed the individual connection agreements or energisation schedules for the secured sites.
The 1GW figure remains a planned network target rather than committed operating capacity.
The company also intends to recover heat for district heating, industrial processes, and greenhouses where suitable users are nearby.
Heat reuse will depend on local demand, temperature requirements, pipework, and commercial arrangements. A data centre cannot turn waste heat into a useful output simply by making it technically available.
The Hertfordshire site will provide the first operating test of Civo’s model.
The opening phase will show how the cooling and electrical architecture performs at 8MW. Expansion towards 38MW will test whether the same site can absorb a much larger load without major redesign of supporting infrastructure.
A full rollout would create a distributed network whose nodes increasingly resemble compact high density data centres rather than traditional edge rooms.
Bringing compute closer to users changes where infrastructure is built. It does not reduce the power, cooling, land, and maintenance required at each site.
