IXEurope Plans Datacenter

LONDON -- IXEurope plc, one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing datacentre outsourcers, has signed lease and construction agreements to build a new datacentre in the West of London. The site will initially provide a gross area of 6,500m2 in an investment project of around £15 million, most of which will be spent over the next 24 months.

The ‘London4’ facility will be IXEurope’s largest in London to date and is a key part of the Group’s strategy to buy or build new datacentres across Europe in response to significant customer demand, as stated when it listed on AIM in April 2006.

The project entails the construction of a specially built shell to accommodate two floors of approximately 6,500m2 each and the actual fit out of one floor initially. The first fitted-out floor, which will deliver around 5,000m2 of net space, will be phased to meet customer demand. It is expected to be in use during the first half of 2007. Each floor is approximately 25% larger than the London2 IXDatacentre situated near Heathrow.

The £15 million funding for the building shell and first floor fit-out is expected to be through a combination of debt finance and cash. IXEurope will separately fit out the second floor in due course, subject to customer demand.

Guy Willner, Chief Executive of IXEurope said:

"The requirement to fund this expansion was a significant element in our decision to float earlier this year. This development, coming in addition to our recent datacentre acquisitions in Park Royal (West London), Munich and Frankfurt, reinforces our position as a leading provider of enterprise datacentre services in Europe and as Europe’s fastest growing datacentre services company.

“We have successfully placed major anchor customers in each of the three new IXDatacentres and given the current traction of our UK operation, we are confident of a similar result when we open London4 IXDatacentre in H1 2007.

“Whilst traditionally focused on hosting IT infrastructure for, and providing Internet exchange services to, the Internet and telecoms sector, the market continues to broaden to cover the growing hosting and interconnection needs of the whole enterprise sector. This is driving increased demand for highly specified datacentre capacity from providers with significant operating history, such as IXEurope.

IXEurope