nLighten completes £15m refurbishment of Bristol ‘edge’ datacentre | JP
nLighten has completed a £15m refurbishment of its Bristol datacentre, doubling its artificial intelligence (AI)-ready power capacity to 1.2MW to support regional enterprise workloads.
The upgrade – which scales the site from 750kW and introduces a modular 2.4MW lithium-battery uninterruptible power supply (UPS) alongside closed-loop cooling – forms part of a wider UK expansion programme by nLighten, which is investing more than £100m to upgrade its national network.
Located in Bristol’s established technology corridor at the Aztec West business park, the facility aims to support regional enterprises, such as in Bristol’s defence, aerospace and AI research clusters.
The building was originally built in 1995 for Royal Sun Alliance and later by several other office occupiers. Conversion to a datacentre involved structural upgrades plus a mechanical and electrical infrastructure overhaul, the latest of which will see it expanded to 1.2MW. Current active IT load is approximately 180kW, so there’s lots of headroom for incoming customer deployments.
The datacentre comprises 42 newly installed 47U racks with cold-aisle containment server cooling. The heat rejection system is a closed-loop chilled water design that consumes no water once it has been filled and routes externally to two Engie dry cooling units.
According to nLighten engineers, these operate non-mechanically most of the time – ie, fan-only – but will add refrigeration during extreme heat, such as the current heatwave.
To support the likely arrival of high-density AI compute, data hall plumbing is ready for direct-to-chip liquid cooling to be tapped in, which will allow the site to scale to high-density deployments of 150kW to 200kW per rack.
In the event of mains failure, the UPS is designed to bridge the load for up to 20 minutes at 1.2MW, while standby diesel generators are configured to start and take the full load on the bus bar within 18 seconds.
Operational resilience is maintained through weekly engineering drills and quarterly mains-fail transfer tests, to ensure the engineering team is prepared for emergency procedures.
nLighten is positioning the Bristol facility as a “sovereign infrastructure hub” in an effort to target public sector organisations and private enterprises with data residency, security and long-term operational resilience requirements.
Explaining the focus on sovereignty and legacy upgrades, Dawn Childs, CEO of nLighten, said: “This is part of our mission to improve sustainability, to improve connectivity, to improve the network of edge datacentres. Regarding sovereignty, we are in the vanguard of that because we are taking legacy datacentres and enabling edge deployments so you can really know where your data is, what’s being done with it.”
While edge datacentres – smaller facilities, often in repurposed buildings – can provide customers with local access and some peace of mind in the sovereignty department, converting older commercial infrastructure into high-density AI environments is likely to present physical limitations.
Although nLighten’s Bristol facility has integrated cold-aisle containment and direct-to-chip liquid cooling readiness, legacy structures often suffer from rigid ceiling heights and floor load constraints. As Nvidia’s roadmap introduces rack designs that will demand up to 1MW of power draw, and therefore heat creation, retrofitting older spaces becomes exponentially difficult while designing adequate heat rejection pathways within confined footprints will be an engineering hurdle.
Furthermore, regional expansions are heavily dependent on local grid availability. While a 5MVA grid connection provides sufficient near-term capacity for nLighten’s current 1.2MW design, securing additional power allocation in grid-constrained UK regions is a complex process.
nLighten is backed by global infrastructure investor I Squared Capital and manages a European footprint of 36 carrier-neutral facilities across eight markets, totalling 67MW of capacity. This expansion has been accelerated by strategic acquisitions, including French platform Euclyde Data Centers in June 2023 and Proximity Data Centers in the UK in September 2023.