A former jam factory in the Southall district of London, UK, is set to be converted into a data center complex.

The Southall Way Industrial Estate will be demolished to make way for a four-building data center campus offering floor space of 156,804 sqm (1.6 million sq ft). The campus will also feature office space and a central pavilion.

Councilors on Ealing Council’s planning committee approved the plan at a meeting last month.

The data center is being developed by Global Technical Realty. An end user has not yet been identified. The KKR-backed company purchased the site from previous owner Royal London Asset Management Property in May 2024 for £315 million ($410.7m).

A factory on the site was formerly operated by Ticklers Jam, a British preserves brand which went out of business in the mid-twentieth century. One of the buildings at the campus is being named The Jam Factory to reflect the site’s heritage.

According to GTR, the development will create 460 construction jobs a year and 1,120 permanent operational roles once the build-out is complete.

The company has committed £6.6 million ($8.6m) towards a data center skills and training strategy in the area, as well as £750,000 ($978,000) for a local economy management plan and £300,000 ($391,000) for flood risk mitigation.

Southall is in West London, one of the UK capital’s busiest data center markets.

Investment firm KKR announced it was committing $1 billion to set up a new European hyperscale data center player in GTR in May 2020.

Franek Sodzawiczny, founder & CEO at Global Technical Realty, previously founded two British data center colocation providers: Sentrum, which was sold to Digital Realty for around $1 billion in 2012, and Zenium, which sold to CyrusOne for $442 million in 2017.

The company has to date delivered one campus in Slough. GTR is also developing data centers in Petah Tikva, Israel (due for delivery later this year), and Barcelona, Spain.