SAN ANTONIO — Owner-operator H5 Data Centers will undertake a 5,000-square-foot expansion project at its 80,000-square-foot colocation facility located at 100 Taylor St. in San Antonio. The project will add Tier III infrastructure capacity to the facility. Data center tiers refer to the requirements of distribution paths, cooling and other components that are used to differentiate facilities. A timeline for the project was not released.
SAN DIEGO — CBRE has arranged the sale of two ground leases covering three land parcels totaling 12.5 acres in San Diego’s Sorrento Mesa neighborhood. A private investor acquired the assets from San Francisco-based Stockbridge Capital Group for $41.5 million. Louay Alsadek, Hunter Rowe and Madison Mawby of CBRE represented the seller, while Bob Safai of Madison Properties represented the buyer in the transaction. Totaling 76,000-square-feet, the first parcel is under South Rim Business Park, a three-building flex office campus located at 5744, 5754 and 5764 Pacific Center Blvd. The second parcel is under two data center buildings totaling 115,000 square feet located at 5732 and 5738 Pacific Center Blvd., while the third parcel is a 0.85-acre open space adjacent to the two other properties.
GALLATIN, TENN. — Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) has broken ground on an $800 million data center located roughly 18 miles north of Nashville in Gallatin. The company acquired the 809-acre development site earlier this year for $20 million under the name Woolhawk LLC, according to reports by local news site Gallatin News. The 982,000-square-foot campus will be built to LEED Gold certification standards, using 80 percent less water than the average data center. The development will also be supported by 100 percent renewable energy. Facebook has signed contracts for 220 megawatts of solar energy in Tennessee in support of the project. The company anticipates more than 1,100 construction workers will be onsite at the peak of construction, and the completed development will support approximately 100 new jobs in the form of technicians, engineers, facility managers, logistics professionals and security personnel. “We’re excited about Facebook in Gallatin because of the advantages we think it is going bring to our community,” says Paige Brown, the city’s mayor. “We’re confident in the brightest of futures for both Facebook and the city of Gallatin.” Facebook unveiled plans to build another $800 million data center 65 miles west of Chicago in Dekalb, Illinois, earlier this year. …
FALL RIVER, MASS. — Boston-based investment firm Rhino Capital Advisors has purchased a 200,000-square-foot data center located in the southern Massachusetts city of Fall River. Rhino Capital is acquiring the center in a sale-leaseback deal in which the seller has committed to a new 10-year lease at the newly built property. Brett Paulsrud and Madeline Joyce of JLL arranged a $10.3 million acquisition loan through Cambridge Savings Bank on behalf of the new ownership.
WACO, TEXAS — Marcus & Millichap has arranged the sale of Simple Self Storage, a 233-unit facility located at 2172 E. Loop 340 in Waco. The property was built in phases between 2017 and 2018 and features 24,740 net rentable square feet of non-climate-controlled space. Units range in size from 25 to 200 rentable square feet, and the site includes roughly two acres for future expansion. Brandon Karr, Danny Cunningham and Bryan Quaschnick of Marcus & Millichap represented the seller and procured the buyer, both of which were limited liability companies that requested anonymity.
DENVER AND LOS ANGELES — Data center developer and operator Vantage Data Centers has entered into a definitive agreement with an investor group led by Colony Capital Inc. (NYSE: CLNY) to form a $3.5 billion partnership that will expand Vantage’s data center platform in North America and Europe. The firms expect the agreement to be finalized toward the end of the month. As part of the agreement, the Colony-led investor group will invest $1.2 billion in Vantage’s portfolio, including 12 stabilized North American data centers that span more than 1.4 million gross square feet in Santa Clara, Calif.; Quincy, Wash.; Montreal; and Quebec City, Canada. Vantage’s management team, led by President and CEO Sureel Choksi, will continue to manage and operate these assets as part of its global data center footprint. The Colony-Vantage partnership will allow Vantage to develop and maintain top-performing data centers in new and existing markets. The Denver-based company has been expanding in Europe the past few months, entering Wales through its acquisition of data center campus Next Generation Data that was announced in April. Vantage also acquired data center provider Etix Everywhere in February. The deal included a data center under construction in Frankfurt, Germany. Vantage …
By Edward Henigin, Chief Technical Officer, Data Foundry The COVID-19 pandemic has been a highly disruptive force in the global market, changing the way businesses, communities and economies operate today — and perhaps into the future. While uncertainty has defined this challenging time, trends have been developing in the wake of the virus’ worldwide impact. One of the most prominent trends has been the shift to remote and digital means of working, communicating and learning. Across nearly every device category, in-home data usage has seen an increase in the first three months of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. This year, the two-week period between March 1 and March 17 alone exhibited a 34 percent increase in smartphone data usage compared to the previous year’s usage during the same period. As a result of social distancing and quarantine protocols, many businesses have reduced onsite work or even shut down their locations in favor of work-from-home options that incorporate video conferencing platforms or other virtual applications. Today’s increased online dependence creates a focus on digital infrastructure, and data centers are only growing in importance (and in demand) as they become more widely recognized as crucial components of a resilient …
DALLAS — Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), a global provider of data colocation services, has completed a $142 million expansion project at its Dallas Infomart Data Center campus. The California-based company’s Dallas campus is located at 1950 N. Stemmons Freeways, spans roughly 1.6 million square feet and offers a power capacity of 60 megawatts. The project represents that first phase of a larger development and provides 72,000 square feet of colocation space for data storage. Future expansion phases may provide as much as 144,000 square feet of colocation space. Equinix purchased the property in 2018 from ASB Real Estate Investments for roughly $800 million.
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. — CoreSite Realty Corp. has completed the third and final phase of SV8, a 162,000-square-foot data center development in Santa Clara. The final phase consists of a 54,000-square-foot building with six megawatts, with 11 percent of the building pre-leased. The first two phases, totaling 108,000 square feet, are fully leased. The 18-megawatt, purpose-built SV8 project is part of CoreSite’s Santa Clara and broader Silicon Valley connected campus, with close proximity to the heart of the high-tech Silicon Valley market.
ASHBURN, VA. — Aligned Energy has broken ground on a 513,000-square-foot extension of its hyperscale data center in Ashburn. Phase I, which was completed in 2019, comprises 370,000 square feet and has a 60-megawatt capacity. Upon completion of Phase II, the data center’s capacity will double to have 120-megawatt capacity. Upon full buildout, the data center will have 180-megawatt capacity and span 1 million square feet. Aligned Energy expects to deliver Phase II by the end of 2020. The facility is located at 21890 Uunet Drive, 30 miles west of downtown Washington, D.C. The colocation property offers access to more than 50 carriers in the region. Plano, Texas-based Aligned Energy has data centers in Ashburn, Phoenix, Dallas and Salt Lake City that offer innovative, sustainable and adaptable colocation and build-to-scale solutions for cloud, enterprise, and managed service providers.