UK data centre lighting set to hit £130m by 2030 says Whitecroft Lighting

The UK data centre lighting market is set to double in size over the next five years, and will be worth around £130 million by 2030, according to projections made by UK commercial lighting manufacturer Whitecroft Lighting.

The UK has become a hotspot for European data centre development, swelling the demand for lighting and M&E. However, the value of lighting as a ratio of the overall construction cost is significantly lower than in traditional buildings, reports the Greater Manchester-based company.

In 2024, the UK data centre lighting market was worth around £54 million – around six percent of the entire UK commercial lighting market. However, that figure is set to explode upwards over the next four years.

“The unprecedented growth of the UK data centre market presents both big opportunities and challenges to lighting manufacturers”, explains Richard Williams, Head of Strategic Projects at Whitecroft Lighting.

“It’s impossible to ignore a growing £32 billion market on your doorstep: to put that in perspective, the entire capital investment budget for NHS estates is around £10 billion this year.

However, data centres present a unique environment, both in their complexity and scale, with developers facing systemic challenges, such as access to the grid and renewable energy, technical resilience and access to water for cooling all taking precedence over more traditional construction and M&E.”

Richard continues: “As a result, Whitecroft’s Strategic Projects team have calculated that the value of data centre lighting, when compared to the overall cost of construction, is 60 percent lower than for a typical commercial building.

However, such is the size of the latest multi-billion-pound hyperscale data centres that larger manufacturers, such as Whitecroft Lighting, can offset this by fulfilling big, varied contracts.”

Whitecroft Lighting has focused on larger-scale infrastructure projects in recent years, particularly where security and resilience are key considerations, as the company manufactures all its products at a large, secure UK facility.

In 2022, Whitecroft secured a contract to custom-design and build the first LED lighting specified for the UK nuclear industry, installing 40,000 LED luminaires at Hinckley Point C in Gloucestershire.

The Greater Manchester-based company also supplied £3 million of lighting to Manchester Airport’s flagship Terminal 2 rebuild and refurbishment projects, supplying 25,000 lights.

Drawing on this knowledge and experience in large-scale sensitive infrastructure, Whitecroft Lighting has recently secured a contract to supply two data centres: one in Portugal and another near Frankfurt, Germany.

Whitecroft is one of 13 specialist lighting brands that constitute the European Fagerhult Group, a number of which are collaborating technically and logistically to deliver data centre projects across Europe – particularly the Netherlands-based Veko Lightsystems.

Richard concludes: “It’s an international market that is growing and maturing at an unprecedented pace, and with that comes increasing competition, but we hope to stay ahead by offering a sole-source solution at scale, that’s secure, and includes every aspect of lighting and emergency backup systems required across the data centre campus – both internally and externally.”