Diegem, Aalst, Antwerp, Gembloux, Huizingen, 23 October 2023 – Data center specialist LCL Data Centers will make €120 million available for infrastructure investments over the next two years. The data center company will invest in expansions as well as in sustainability. More specifically, LCL will invest €100 million in two expansion projects in Aalst and Diegem, and €20 million in sustainability. Among other things, LCL will install solar panels on the façade of LCL Brussels-North (Diegem). The aim of the investments is to enable LCL to become an even larger and sustainable Belgo-European data center network. Thanks to these investments, LCL will once again be at the forefront of the sector when it comes to sustainability.
‘To maintain our leading position in the Belgian data center sector, we need to continue to expand our existing data centers and equip them with sustainable innovations. This is essential if we are to host and serve as many customers as possible. The investments we will make represent a step forward for our company and for existing and future customers’, explained Laurens van Reijen, managing director of LCL Data Centers.
LCL will invest €100 million in the expansion of two of its data centers: LCL Brussels-West (in Aalst) and LCL Brussels-North (in Diegem). Both of these data centers have become fairly cramped owing to an increase in the number of customers. LCL enjoys annual growth of 10%, and the data center company needs to expand in order to accommodate that growth.
A start has already been made in Aalst on the further expansion of the existing data center. This project is scheduled to end by March 2025. Additional data rooms covering a total area of 2,367 m² will be built. Work on expanding the data center in Diegem will start in December 2023 and continue until October 2025. Four floors will be added to the building (five floors in total), which will make it almost as large as the neighbouring PwC office. Construction work has already started on a mains connection for an additional 24 MW plus a 4,000 m² data room.
When it comes to sustainability, LCL will invest the available budget primarily in renewable energy and in measures aimed at improving its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and reducing its carbon footprint.
Among other things, LCL will install solar panels on the façade of LCL Brussels-North (Diegem) to generate renewable energy. In addition, LCL intends to reduce the PUE of all its data centers to 1.3 by 2030. Currently, only LCL Brussels-West (Aalst) has a PUE that is less than 1.3. The data center specialist will accomplish this by investing in more energy-efficient cooling installations, for example. Finally, LCL also intends to reduce its carbon emissions through the deployment of improved leak detectors in its cooling installations, the use of HVO100 - a renewable fuel - for all its emergency generators and the continued electrification of its fleet, as well as other measures.
A total of €20 million is budgeted for these investments.
LCL has frequently said that it believes sustainability is extremely important. The data center specialist confirmed this two years ago when it committed to two initiatives: the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Moreover, last year LCL signed up to Voka's Sustainable Entrepreneurship Charter 2023, and in June 2023 the data center company published its first ever ESG report, which contains specific KPIs for achieving its sustainability goals.
‘These investments will enable us to work towards the sustainability goals we have set out in our ESG report, so that we can gradually become the leading player in the Belgian data center world’, Laurens van Reijen concluded.
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