Verizon Business Bypasses London for New Data Center Due to Olympics

When Verizon Business was hunting for a European city in which to locate a new large data center, the company looked at – and reportedly rejected – London. The reason? Verizon was concerned about a future lack of availability of power due to the upcoming 2012 Olympic Summer Games, which will be hosted in London.

ComputerWeekly is reporting that Terremark, the cloud services provider that was recently acquired by Verizon Business, had sought a large European city in which to locate one of 50 planned data centers across Europe, and ultimately chose Amsterdam in the Netherlands instead due to power concerns.

During a press briefing at Verizon's annual business conference, Terremark's president of European business, Hermann Oggel, told delegates that the choice had ultimately come down to two cities, London and Amsterdam.

“London was full with the Olympics, with no power. And power is a big issue,” said Oggel. “We spoke to utility companies in London and looked at premises, but found it economically better to manage from Amsterdam.”

Oggel said that the Amsterdam-based Network Access Point (NAP) offers capacity for 46 megawatts of power, which will make the new data center the company's most powerful data center in Europe. Another check-mark on the side of Amsterdam as a location is that the city is apparently one of the primary landing ports of submarine fiber from across the Atlantic Ocean.

Verizon acquired Terremark back in January of this year at a cost of $1.4 billion. The acquisition was reportedly to help Verizon pursue its goal of becoming a powerhouse in global cloud computing and what it is calling “everything as a service.”