The Quiet Revolution: Slough’s story shows how data centres can benefit the UK’s economy and communities for good
Today marks the launch of a new Kao Data white paper, The Quiet Revolution: How Data Centres Remade Slough and Secured the UK’s Digital Future, a detailed account of how a town just west of London became one of the most important digital infrastructure clusters anywhere in the world. Slough, my hometown, is not usually the […]
Capacity Europe 2024 – Feedback from the trade show floor
Last month I had the pleasure of attending Capacity Europe in London – one of the key trade shows within the European digital infrastructure sector, and an important venue to meet with our industry colleagues and partners. With so much of my day-to-day work conducted via Teams or Zoom nowadays it’s always good to have […]
Ten is the magic number
I’ve always been a great fan of the number 10. It’s always seemed to me to be a wonderfully special couple of numbers. Individually they don’t add up to much (quite literally…!) but put them together and you can make magic. There were 10 commandments, not eleven. Ever since cave people realised they had 10 […]
Secret no more. Data centres are now prime time
As little as five years ago you never heard about data centres. If you told people you worked ‘in data centres’ they’d either have no idea what you were talking about, or they’d quickly find someone else to talk to. They were the un-seen, unknown and certainly underappreciated “sheds” that didn’t add anything to society. […]
Touring the industry’s future pioneers around the UK’s Best data centre
As part of our ongoing partnership, Kao Data was delighted to welcome a group of Year 12 and 13 students from the UTC Heathrow ‘Digital Futures’ programme to the Kao Data campus in Harlow, last week. It was a real pleasure to be able to provide a first hand understanding of our cutting-edge facilities to […]
My time at Kao Data – Supporting the industry’s brightest minds
A couple of weeks ago, my time as Chairman of Kao Data – the high-performance data centre developer-operator I’ve been working with since 2017 – came to an end. It’s always hard to know the correct point to step away from anything you’re interested in and passionate about, but it was the right time to […]
Cambridge – the fragile energy situation underpinning the UK’s science and research capital
Back in January I wrote about the grid capacity issues in and around West London and Slough, with specific reference to the rapidly growing data centre industry. While I focussed on West London, it isn’t the only place in the South East of England with worrying uncertainty about current and future energy availability. The Greater […]
New Fiscal Year – New Horizons for Kao Data
With a new fiscal year upon us at Kao Data, it is always a good time to reflect on our successes over the last 12 months and look forward to the year ahead. Yesterday I enjoyed chairing our team kick-off meeting in London and it was fantastic to have our team together to re-cap on […]
From concept to reality – Building the Quantum data centres of the future
Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning have quickly transformed the speed and scale of business decisions and we are tantalisingly close to mimicking the human brain. So much so that today, Alan Turing would be proud! But these processes still can’t quite understand the brain or “make a simulation of nature”, as […]
Exploring the pioneering use cases of AI and machine learning within fintech and financial services
I spend a lot of my time in the city of London, meeting colleagues from the world of financial services to support them with their computing and data centre challenges. More and more of our conversations are encompassing the need to house heavy-duty, high density artificial intelligence (AI) hardware – an area which is completely […]