Brexit threat spurs Colt’s 150km expansion in Dublin
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Brexit threat spurs Colt’s 150km expansion in Dublin

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Brexit – the UK’s expected departure from the European Union – is one of the reasons behind Colt’s expansion of its Dublin network, CEO Carl Grivner confirmed.

Speaking to Capacity yesterday, hours before the company officially announced the 150km network expansion in the Irish capital, Grivner said: “Dublin is already very strong, and Brexit is maybe leading to more activity. It’s not so much Colt as our customers. Dublin is very exciting in terms of what’s happening in this market.”

Colt was celebrating its expansion on Thursday evening with a party in Facebook’s European head office in Dublin, and the plans were officially announced first thing on Friday.

“We already have a strong presence in the city,” Grivner told Capacity. “We looked at 250 cities in terms of growth and data centres. Dublin comes out very forcibly in that area. I can count 25 cranes from my window. There’s lots of new construction.”

Dublin is being tipped as the place many US and other international companies will go for their European headquarters as Ireland will remain part of the EU, even if the UK leaves as the UK government plans on 30 March 2019. Banks, for example, based in Ireland will be able to operate across the 27 remaining EU members – while the position of UK-based banks is still not known while negotiations continue between the UK government and the European Commission.

Colt is also planning to announce expansion in Berlin “next week”, Grivner hinted to Capacity. “It has some of the same characteristics – a lot of new growth. It interests us in terms of the density of our network.”

Colt has been in Dublin for 20 years, said Grivner. “We are overbuilding the network and expanding to where Dublin is expanding. This is a robust expansion. We’re focused just on the network. We’re not into data centres and cloud. Dublin is the hot spot. It’s very natural for us to build here.”

Colt said that according to the European Commission, the Irish economy will have grown by 5.6% in 2018.

 

 

 

 

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