Pure starts piling on 70MW Brent Cross shell with no tenant named

Pure Data Centres has begun piling on the second building at its Brent Cross campus in North London, a 70MW shell that the developer says will open the final major build phase at LON01, and the developer names no tenant for it. Glencar, the general contractor, is at work on the West Cold Shell — foundations, underground services, the structural frame, stair cores, and the building envelope — with connections tied into the East Cold Shell, while completion of the wider B2 facility is scheduled for the second quarter of 2029, when the more than 23,000 square meters being added will lift the campus to 90MW.

The building is aimed at the part of the market that needs liquid cooling and density: LON01 will feature closed-loop liquid cooling intended for high-density AI inference and cloud workloads, and B2 will include a living wall with more than 750,000 plants that Pure says will be one of the world's largest. Those specifications are not generic-shell choices; they are made for a structure meant to hold high-utilization hardware for years.

Founded in 2015 and backed by funds managed by Oaktree, Pure says it has more than 500MW of IT capacity in operation or development across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, with projects live or in development in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Abu Dhabi, Madrid, Jakarta, and Seinäjoki, and a 56MW scheme in Park Royal alongside Segro. Brent Cross secured planning permission last year, and Pure announced the expansion earlier this year.

The announcement describes the contractor, the capacity, the cooling system, and the completion date, but no customer is identified, which puts B2 in the merchant lane where capacity is built first and leased after. A merchant build is self-underwritten until a committed payer appears; the piling at Brent Cross is a capital commitment funded by Oaktree, not an asset yet priced by a lease.

For an operator of Pure's size, a 90MW campus is a credible footprint for a cloud or AI tenant, and the Brent Cross site already has planning consent and an active contractor. But the gap between now and Q2 2029 is the risk: the project will be valued on the customer that eventually appears, and the longer the public record names no one, the more Brent Cross reads as development risk waiting to become an infrastructure asset.