Plans are now in place for two cloud hosting facilities at Queensway Park in Glenrothes, the first of which will cover an area of over 90,000 sq ft and is hoped to be ready for occupation towards the end of 2016. Once completed, Queensway Park will be the largest co-location data centre campus in Scotland with a development value approaching £100 million.

In addition to state of the art data halls for high performance computer racks, the development will include grade A office accommodation with a security centre, client space and facilities management operation. Built towards BREEAM outstanding standards the facility will target a PUE (power usage efficiency) rating of under 1.15 making it one of the most efficient in the world.

A pre-application notice was lodged with Fife Council in January last year and was welcomed by council leaders as a strategically important part of Scotland’s technology infrastructure.

The company behind the development, Queensway Park Data Centres Ltd, is a joint venture between AOC Group and County Properties Group.

The facility will draw power from the adjacent RWE Innogy biomass plant which is the largest built to date in the UK producing up to 65 mega watts of electricity. The majority of the plants fuel comes in the form of wood waste with a very small proportion from sustainable forestry.

Robin Presswood, the council’s head of economy, planning and employability services, said: “This as an important piece of business infrastructure that Fife can offer companies looking for improved business performance through cloud computing and to companies using Big Data to identify new business trends and opportunities, particularly in financial services and the energy industries.”

Queensway Park Data Centres director Alan O’Connor added: “Interest in the Fife facility has been strong and although we are building towards shared or co-location facilities, we are not ruling out the possibility of a single user requirement for either phase.”

There are currently only seven co-location facilities in Scotland in comparison with about 214 throughout the rest of the UK.