BRISTOW, VA. — An affiliate of e-commerce giant Amazon, Amazon Data Services, has acquired a site in Prince William County for a future data center campus. The firm acquired the undeveloped site near Devlin Road and I-66 in Bristow for $700 million, according to Washington Business Journal. CoStar Group reports that Stanley Martin Homes, a Reston, Va.-based homebuilder, sold the 188-acre site to Amazon and that Eastdil Secured represented the land seller in the deal. Washington Business Journal reports that the Prince William Board of County Supervisors rezoned the site for data center development in November 2023 and has since been in a legal dispute, with the Court of Appeals of Virginia recently upholding the county’s original rezoning decision.
NEW YORK CITY — Rudin has extended an existing $425 million CMBS loan backed by 32 Avenue of the Americas, a 27-story office tower in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. The New York City-based owner-operator has also announced plans for a $100 million capital improvement program at the 1.2 million-square-foot Art Deco property, which also features a prominent data center/carrier hotel component. Rudin will introduce a prebuilt program of new work environments at 32 Avenue of the Americas that will range in size from 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. The company will also upgrade the building’s lobby and renovate its street-level retail space. Lastly, Rudin will create a new leasing/marketing center spanning the entire 25th floor, which also features two outdoor terraces that offer views of the Manhattan skyline. The tower’s mortgage will now mature in November 2029 should Rudin exercise both of its one-year renewal options in 2027 and 2028. Iron Hound Management Co. advised Rudin, which acquired the property in 1999 from AT&T, on the loan modification. The direct lender was not named. Rudin requested that its loan be transferred to an unnamed special servicer two months ahead of its November maturity in order to begin discussions on the loan modification. …
STAFFORD COUNTY, VA. — Vantage Data Centers will invest $2 billion to develop a 929,000-square-foot data center campus in Stafford County, which is situated near Fredericksburg, Va., and approximately 40 miles south of Washington, D.C. The new 192-megawatt (MW) campus, dubbed VA4, is situated just roughly 54 miles from Vantage’s three existing Virginia campuses in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” and brings the company’s statewide capacity to 782 MW with a combined investment of approximately $8 billion. Development of the new campus is expected to create 1,100 construction jobs and at least 50 permanent operations jobs. The first building at VA4 is scheduled to open in late 2027. VA4 will be built to achieve LEED Silver certification, in alignment with Vantage’s “sustainable by design” blueprint. The center will also utilize a closed-loop chilled water system that minimizes the need for large volumes of water. Additionally, VA4 will feature liquid-to-liquid cooling with coolant distribution unit (CDU) equipment, which can handle 100 percent of critical IT workloads.
PORT WASHINGTON, WIS. — Vantage Data Centers and the Wisconsin Building Trades Council have partnered to build the previously announced Lighthouse data center campus in Port Washington, a northern Milwaukee suburb located along Lake Michigan. The $15 billion-plus, privately funded investment will require a workforce of more than 4,000 skilled construction workers over a three-year period and will rely on local union labor to the fullest extent possible. The new campus, part of OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate expansion, will feature four data centers. Completion is slated for 2028. Once complete, Vantage and Oracle will create more than 1,000 long-term jobs and thousands more indirect jobs. Lighthouse is designed to preserve local resources, support new clean energy resources and advance environmental stewardship.
By Felicia Santiago, architect, Gensler As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies evolve and scale, digital infrastructure must follow suit. While advocating for historic buildings to find new life via preservation as data centers is understandable, not every structure is well-suited for this type of repurposing. But this shouldn’t stop developers from overlooking two big opportunities for data center construction plays: revitalizing existing vacant properties as data centers and re-tooling legacy data centers for today’s AI needs. The beauty of adaptive reuse is that it theoretically preserves the existing fabric of community while incorporating modern infrastructure where it is needed — within the fabric of the community. Another opportunity to repurpose existing facilities into modern data centers involves potentially bypassing regulatory items that cause challenges and delays, such as rezoning, since these data centers would be grandfathered into that use. Legacy data centers — once the backbone of enterprise computing — are increasingly outdated and unable to support the energy intensity, cooling demands and density required by AI infrastructure. Rather than defaulting to new construction, there’s an urgent opportunity to recycle existing buildings. The sustainability practices of repurposed buildings should not be overlooked as the need for data centers continues to grow. …
SALINE TOWNSHIP, MICH. — OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has unveiled plans to build a new Stargate campus in Saline Township near Ann Arbor as part of its 4.5-gigawatt partnership with Oracle. Combined with capacity from OpenAI’s six previously announced U.S. Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank, this project brings Stargate to more than 8 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $450 billion in investment over the next three years. In January, the company announced a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment. Related Digital is developing the Stargate Michigan campus. Construction is expected to begin in early 2026 and create more than 2,500 union construction jobs. DTE Energy will serve the campus using existing excess transmission capacity, avoiding impacts on local energy supply. OpenAI says that any upgrades required to support operations will be funded by the project and not local ratepayers. The project will span 1.6 million square feet across three buildings, according to Crain’s Detroit Busienss. OpenAI has previously announced Stargate sites in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Ohio.
DALLAS — A consortium led by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership has entered into an agreement to acquire Dallas-based Aligned Data Centers for approximately $40 billion. The sellers are Macquarie Asset Management and its co-investment partners. Subject to regulatory approvals, the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026. This deal marks Macquarie Asset Management’s second major data center transaction in the last year, following the 2024 sale of AirTrunk to a consortium of investors that valued the company at $16 billion. Aligned Data Centers has rapidly scaled across North and South America, serving hyperscale, AI and enterprise customers. In recent years, Aligned has expanded its footprint from two operational facilities in Dallas and Phoenix to more than 50 campuses across the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia, representing over 5 gigawatts (GW) of operational and planned capacity, including assets under development. Aligned also obtained the first-ever green data center securitization, and first-ever sustainability-linked financing for a data center platform, according to company representatives. “This transaction underscores Macquarie Asset Management’s ability to consistently identify key thematics early and find opportunities that create value for our clients and partners,” says Ben …
ALPHARETTA, GA. — Principal Asset Management has sold a 185,000-square-foot, 15.2-megawatt (MW) data center in Alpharetta, a northern suburb of Atlanta. The buyer and sales price were not disclosed, but the acquisition included developable land adjacent to the data center. A U.S.-based data center fund managed by Principal purchased the facility in 2022 in a joint venture with Lincoln Rackhouse, a division of Lincoln Property Co. The single-story data center was leased to two unnamed companies at the time of sale, one of which is a Fortune 100 financial services firm. The data center was originally built in 2009 as a build-to-suit for a telecommunications tech company.
CHANTILLY, VA. — Penzance has received a $100 million construction loan for the development of Chantilly Premier, a 241,000-square-foot data center in Chantilly, roughly 34 miles west of Washington, D.C. Marshall Scallan, Michael Zelin and Bindi Shah of Cushman & Wakefield arranged the loan through QuadReal Property Group on behalf Penzance. Penzance recently broke ground on the fully preleased center, which is situated on 12 acres of a 79-acre site, located adjacent to the Chantilly Auto Park, according to the Washington Business Journal. An affiliate of Penzance originally acquired the vacant parcel in August 2022. Chantilly Premier is slated for completion by mid-2027.
CHICAGO — Related Midwest and CRG have broken ground on the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park (IQMP), the first phase of Quantum Shore Chicago, a 440-acre, master-planned technology and innovation district along the Chicago lakefront. The project is located on the former U.S. Steel South Works site at 8080 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive in the South Chicago neighborhood. The co-developers are receiving financing from funds managed by Blue Owl Capital on both the land acquisition and vertical development of facilities for IQMP’s anchor tenant, PsiQuantum, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company with a mission “to build and deploy the world’s first useful quantum computers.” Quantum computing utilizes quantum mechanics to solve complex problems such as climate, energy and defense challenges faster than traditional computers. Created through a public-private partnership with State of Illinois and federal agencies, IQMP will occupy 128 acres on the southern end of the development site. In addition to PsiQuantum’s 80,700-square-foot office and research facility — the first of several buildings the firm will eventually occupy — the campus will include a cryoplant (a facility that uses extremely low temperatures to produce gases like liquid helium and nitrogen for high-tech applications) and equipment labs, as well as …
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