Data Centres

A proper understanding of real estate and landlord and tenant issues is integral to any data centres business. Our market-leading real estate team has been advising investors, developers, occupiers and funders in the data centres sector for over two decades.

The CMS real estate lawyers work seamlessly with data centre specialists in our planning, construction, power, sustainability and tech teams, ensuring that we bring to your transaction a deep understanding of the sector’s unique characteristics, sensitivities and challenges.

Sector expertise

We advise on a range of transactions on the various aspects of data centres, both through direct and indirect investments. Our long standing relationships demonstrate our commitment to our clients. We have worked with many real estate clients (such as fund managers, funds, insurance companies, pensions funds, property companies and private investors) for many years, and are renowned by the breadth of our client work. During that time we have witnessed:

• the evolution of facilities from “sheds with power” to truly bespoke, occupier-led designs;
• increasingly sophisticated contractual arrangements to protect the interests of the end-user – step-in rights, options, rights of first offer and first refusal;
• the globalisation of legal concepts and documentation, as the hyperscalers have sought to impose consistency across their worldwide portfolios;
• the rise of sale and leasebacks as financial institutions and enterprises look to consolidate and outsource their data centre requirements;
• the ever-increasing influence of ESG compliance, as the data centres sector comes under increasing public and political scrutiny;
• the transformation of the sector into a truly investible asset class.

CMS has one of the largest and most experienced multi-disciplinary Real Estate Groups in the UK with over 300 lawyers and is recognised as the leading provider of real estate legal services, holding an outstanding 24 Band 1 and Tier 1 rankings (England and Scotland) across the legal directories. Our sector specialist teams advise across all asset types, including data centres. 

We expect these trends to continue and accelerate.

Our experience in Data Centres

Our multi-jurisdictional experience and interdisciplinary approach is anchored in our expertise in the following areas:  

• Real estate 
• Planning
• Investments
• Construction
• Technology
• Power
• Dispute Resolution
• Finance
• Data, privacy and cyber security
• Funds
• ESG/Sustainability
• Commercial Contracts