UK landlord Segro expands data centre drive to ride AI boom

* Segro (SEGXF) targets data centre expansion in France, Germany, Italy

* Company secures power for UK sites

* Data centres only 7% of Segro's (SEGXF) total clients (Rewrites with comments from CEO on data centre development)

By Raechel Thankam Job and Yadarisa Shabong

April 23 (Reuters) - British warehouse owner Segro (SEGXF) is expanding its push into data centres, lining up sites in France, Germany, Italy and Poland as it looks to benefit from a global boom in artificial intelligence spending, its CEO told Reuters.

"We believe that there will be very strong demand in the coming years in and around other major cities," David Sleath said in an interview on Thursday.

"We are working on getting planning permissions and securing the power on a number of those sites."

Segro (SEGXF), which owns around 10.9 million square metres of space, is betting on rising demand for AI data centres despite industry concerns over power supply constraints.

POWER SUPPLIES

Sleath said the group is well positioned on power availability for its sites in London and Slough, west of the capital, where it has secured 400 megawatts of power upgrades.

Segro (SEGXF) signed a pre-let agreement for a 30,000 square metre data centre in Slough in the first quarter, and won planning approval for a 1-billion-pound ($1.35 billion) 56-megawatt data centre in West London.

Long electricity connection queues across Europe have slowed data centre expansion plans for some technology groups, including Amazon (AMZN), fuelling concerns over delayed or cancelled projects.

Sleath said some developers were building speculatively without pre-let agreements, leaving them exposed to planning changes.

"We're very clear we're not going to do that", he said, adding that Segro (SEGXF) would only commit capital once it has secured a pre-lease from a hyperscaler.

Data centre operators accounted for about 7% of Segro's (SEGXF) customers last year, with transport and logistics, retail and food manufacturing making up the largest share of its client base.

($1 = 0.7409 pounds) (Reporting by Raechel Thankam Job and Yadarisa Shabong in Bengaluru. Editing by Sonia Cheema and Mark Potter)