Pure Data Centres has installed the third and final transformer at its LON01 campus in Brent Cross, London, pushing the substation to 150MVA and clearing the way for full 90MW energization later this month.

The three Hitachi Energy-supplied units are rated at 75MVA each. Together that's roughly the electrical supply a mid-sized town draws — now dedicated to two buildings, B1 and B2, with dedicated ductwork already in place for the B2 connection.

Why did the install need a 1,000-ton gantry?

Space, or the lack of it. The substation at LON01 is live, and there simply wasn't room around it to bring in a conventional 500-ton crane. So the project team designed and built a specialist gantry system with a 1,000-ton lifting capacity to move the transformer into its permanent position safely.

For practitioners, that's the notable part: the workaround doubled the lifting capacity of the original plan and kept the existing substation energized throughout. No downtime, no workaround sequencing that pushed the timeline publicly off track.

What happens next at Brent Cross?

The timeline is tight and the milestones are stacked:

• Planning permission secured last year.
• Expansion plans announced earlier this year.
• Work on the second building, B2, commenced last month.
• B2 completion slated for Q2 2029.

Energization of the 90MW campus is expected later this month, assuming the substation commissioning runs to schedule.

What's inside the buildings?

LON01 will use closed-loop liquid cooling, a choice aimed squarely at high-density AI inference and cloud workloads. If you're sizing racks for inference deployments, that's the spec that matters — closed-loop liquid cooling is what makes high-density builds viable without resorting to impractical airside strategies.

B2 will also carry one of the world's largest living walls, with more than 750,000 plants — three-quarters of a million plants on a single data center facade. It's an unusual flourish for a power-dense facility, and one Pure is clearly happy to lead with.

Who is Pure Data Centres?

The company was established in 2015 and is backed by funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management. It currently has more than 500MW of IT capacity in operation or development across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Its live and in-development footprint spans London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Abu Dhabi, Madrid, Jakarta, and Seinäjoki. The Brent Cross campus, once fully built out, will rank among the company's most significant single-site commitments.