DAVID DEANS goes behind the security gates to investigate LG white elephant is now set for data expansion.

IT was best known to people in Newport as the city’s “white elephant” – a shell of a building built for a semi-conductor plant that never came.

But for the last four years a building planned for the LG plant has been home to Next Generation Data – one of the largest data centres in the world.

The site has already fitted out around 2,000 racks of servers in nine data halls, with the potential to consume as much as 12 megawatts of electricity.

Just one data hall uses 1.5 megawatts – enough to power a small village of 750 houses.

Given the sensitivity of the data contained on site, getting in is less than straight forward.

After clearing security gates visitors have to be chaperoned around the site – and even the chief executive officer Nick Razey doesn’t have access to all of the building.

The site is home to several big customers, including IBM and BT, many of whom sell on data and telecommunication services to private companies and public bodies.

Mr Razey said the small risk of the Coedkernew site being subject to a terrorist attack than in London was one of the reasons the firm came to Newport.

“I personally had a company in the 90s that was affected by the IRA bomb in 1996,” he said, saying that his data centre was “pretty close” to the Docklands incident.

“Luckily no one was hurt but we couldn’t get into the building for weeks”.

Next Generation Data started working in the shell of the three-floor 75,000 square foot former LG building in 2008.

“It was like a multistorey car park in terms of its finish,” Mr Razey said.

Some of the site is still like that, with the firm working its way through – it is currently fitting out three more data halls in addition to the nine it already has.

“We will be continually building for the next five to ten years.

There’s three floors here. We’ve got loads of space ahead of us,” he said.

Each data hall can use a maximum of 1.5 megawatts – equivalent to the power used by 750 homes.

It’s energy is bought from a firm called Smartest Energy, which aggregates green power from small wind farms: “It’s 100 per cent renewable energy”.

NGN employs around 30 people, Mr Razey said. “We’ve had no problems whatsoever getting great technical staff,” he said.

“We’ve had Welsh guys working in London saying I’d love to come back and live in Wales again, have you got any jobs going?”

He said one survey has put the data centre down as the fourth largest in the world. Mr Razey said it was the largest in Europe in terms of physical size, and the company was approaching making a £2 million profit this year.