IBM will open its London SoftLayer facility next month as part of its US$1.2bn global expansion investment, announced at the beginning of the year.

It acquired SoftLayer last year for $2bn and is moving all of its cloud services onto SoftLayer.

IBM said it will deliver cloud services from 40 data centers worldwide in 15 countries worldwide by the end of the year.

According to v3 SoftLayer’s London data center was due to open at the end of June but will now come online at some time in July.

SoftLayer’s co-founder and VP of global sales Steven Canale said the facility will be located in Chessington, just outside of London.

“London has the headquarters of about a third of the biggest companies around the world, so it is obviously very fertile ground for many enterprise businesses, but this is part of our overall $1.2bn expansion, so we’re not just building out here in London, it’s around the globe,” Canale said.

SoftLayer’s London facility will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking.