Newham council has approved plans for a £750m hyperscale data centre partly designed by Foster & Partners.

Lead architect on the Bidder Street scheme is datacentre specialist TTSP with Fosters designing the building’s facade and public realm.

Masterminded by insurance giant Legal & General, specialist digital infrastructure investment firm Goldacre and London-based data centre specialist sineQN, the scheme will deliver 77mw of IT processing capacity by early 2027.

Source: Legal & General

The scheme (right), which will be built next door to a planned residential development, is due to be completed by early 2027

Project manager and cost consultant is Rider Levett Bucknall. Other consultants on the team include Curtins, Arup and M&E specialist Hoare Lea.

The data centre will be located a little more than 500m from the London Internet Exchange on a former scrap metal recycling site in Canning Town.

It will be set up with the capacity to recycle heat produced by the computer servers, although there are no current plans to build the district heating network necessary for local residents to benefit from this.

The project has been masterplanned in collaboration with the Crown Wharf project to the southwest, for which a planning application for a residential-led development has been submitted by Barratt Homes.

Matteo Colombo, managing director of digital infrastructure, asset management, at L&G said the firm was “committed to delivering critical infrastructure for today and tomorrow’s society, and through strategic partnerships, we are actively identifying opportunities in this sector that are critical to economic functioning and productivity growth”.