New Year Business Guide - brought to you by APL Media • Wednesday 14 January 2026


Tech, Software & Marketing • 17 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Data centres are changing, is the price?


The data centre industry is in the midst of a profound transformation. Once considered the unseen engine rooms of the digital world, data centres are now on everyone’s radar


Why? Because the rise of AI has shifted the game. The volume and intensity of workloads moving into these facilities is accelerating and the impact on how we power, cool and even fund these environments is nothing short of revolutionary.


WET COOLING ISN’T JUST COMING — IT’S HERE The next generation of compute isn’t just bigger — it’s radically different. Traditional enterprise servers typically ran at modest rack densities of 5-15KW, with high- performance deployments pushing to around 40KW per rack. But the new wave of AI-driven computing changes everything. GPU-first racks are now starting at 120kW and, in extreme cases, will surge towards 600kW per rack. That level of power density doesn’t work with legacy cooling design. Air cooling alone isn’t enough; instead, we’re entering the era of direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems. Wet cooling isn’t just coming — it’s here. This technical shift is also


reshaping the industry’s structure.


Hyperscalers — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and their peers — deploy campuses that range from 50MW to gigawatt-class footprints. To put that in familiar terms, a single hyperscale campus can match or exceed the average electrical consumption of a UK town of 100,000 homes. Below that level sits the enterprise and retail market, where facilities are sized in the 1-20MW range, with many far below that mark. These smaller yet critical edge and regional facilities often serve businesses and workloads that value proximity, control and flexibility. The scale and complexity of


modern deployments have fuelled a unique ecosystem of industry stakeholders. Over the past two decades, three clear roles have emerged: the funders, the operators and the designer-builders. Each plays a specialist part in delivering enormous capital-intensive facilities that must run with extraordinary efficiency and reliability. And with hyperscale tenants now representing some of the strongest commercial


By 2011, Custodian had already won a green award, thanks to its PUE results


CEO SAYS: “Drawing on over 40 years of combined technical, engineering and construction experience in the data centre sector, Rob and I have built a next-generation delivery model that dramatically reduces cost without compromising quality. The result? Premium data-centre capacity starting at an unbeatable £85 per kW/month across our Maidstone, Dartford sites and soon to be adding locations in Cardiff and more excitingly West London.”


ROWLAND KINCH —


covenants in global markets, pension funds and institutional investors have poured into the sector. Pre-2020 construction costs for premium data centres sat in the £6-8m per MW range. Today, that figure commonly sits nearer £10-12m per MW. The question many are asking is whether this inflation is an unavoidable reality — or if the industry has simply accepted it.


WHERE EFFICIENCY MEETS INNOVATION IN DATA CENTRE DESIGN One company making the case for another way is Custodian. Founded 15 years ago by Rowland Kinch and Robert Williams, the business deliberately positioned itself at the retail end of the market to build something different. Its first facility in Maidstone broke from the conventions of its time. Instead of adopting the entrenched air-on-raised-floor cooling model — dramatically inefficient for the energy-to-cooling ratio — it engineered its own filtered fresh-air and mechanical-assisted cooling solution. That decision paid off almost immediately. By 2011, the


business had already won a green award, thanks to market-leading PUE results, around 1.25 at a time when many operators hovered near 2.0. Today, Custodian has successfully designed, built, and is now operating sites in Maidstone and Dartford. The company plans to expand further in 2026 with new locations in Cardiff and West London, thereby extending its engineering-driven approach across its expanding footprint. Over the decade that followed,


Custodian doubled down on engineering rather than convention. By designing and building systems in-house, it retained control not only over cost, but also innovation velocity. It’s since delivered multiple new data halls, each iteration more efficient and resilient than the last. Crucially, this approach has allowed Custodian to continue meeting Tier


III-class resilience requirements avoiding the escalating capex norm that dominates much of the sector.


UNDERSTANDING THE TRUE COST OF DATA CENTRE DEVELOPMENT Which brings us back to the original question: does a data centre really need to cost £10-12m per megawatt in 2026? For hyperscale’s pursuing economies of continent-scale, perhaps those numbers are now an inevitable by-product of ambition and speed. But for many operators, the lesson from companies like Custodian is clear: there’s still room in this industry for efficiency, ingenuity and challenger thinking. The future may be dense, liquid- cooled and AI-heavy — but it doesn’t have to be wasteful, nor prohibitively expensive for those willing to engineer smarter, not just bigger.


For further information Visit: custodiandc.com E: info@custodiandc.com T: 01622 230382


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