FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
The UK’s data centre vacancy rate has compressed sharply in the last decade, from 27 per cent in 2016 to 8 per cent in Q1 2026, with London’s vacancy rate currently even lower at just 7 per cent according to Savills. A record amount of capacity – 217MW – took space across the country in 2025, up from 212MW in 2024, with 96MW taken in the final quarter of 2025 alone.
The international real estate advisor says that UK data centre demand is converging on a limited pool of capacity that can be delivered in the right places and within occupiers’ timeframes. While options to expand beyond the capital are increasingly considered, existing and future supply and occupier focus remains still largely concentrated in London where cloud ecosystems, network density and established availability zones continue to anchor site selection, says Savills.
However, this competition for sites in and around the capital is intensifying pressure on power, land and delivery timelines. According to Savills, London currently accounts for 1,637MW (91 per cent) of the UK’s total live capacity of 1,803MW, up from 81 per cent in 2016.
While Savills says that UK-wide expansion will increase national capacity in the long-term, outside the London orbit the cloud market currently remains comparatively shallow as developers favour building on existing infrastructure networks, where connectivity is already established and development risks are lower.
Rupert Duckworth, Associate Director, Savills Data Centre Advisory, comments: “National supply is expanding on paper, but much of the pipeline remains early-stage and uncertain. Pre-letting has become a core feature of the market, with future capacity increasingly committed well before completion.
“While activity remains anchored to tier-one locations around London, with Manchester cited secondary, beyond these two cities activity is limited reflecting how difficult it remains to deliver network density, occupier ecosystems and timely access to power.”
FM teams are having to manage more sites, contracts and client expectations with the same number of people. AI isn’t replacing those people: it’s absorbing the coordination overhead that was stealing their time.
On Tuesday 16 June at 11:00am, askporter and FMJ will be holding a webinar which brings together FM leaders who are already using this tech, to discuss what is changing, what is not, and how the future looks for teams that get this right.
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