US Data Center Construction Update: Week of October 12

CyrusOne Buys Land for Huge Phoenix Expansion

CyrusOne, a Carrollton, Texas-based data center provider that grew up providing colocation services to the Texas oil and gas sector, has bought a 29-acre property next to its already enormous data center campus in Chandler, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix.

The company expects data center construction on the new property to take place over the next several years, envisioning a campus with more than 2 million square feet of data center space, including both existing and future capacity.

CyrusOne already refers to the existing campus as the largest data center campus in the country. Its two existing buildings are 180,000 square feet each.

Facebook Breaks Ground in Los Lunas

Officials at the Facebook data center groundbreakingin Los Lunas, New Mexico (Photo: Facebook)

Facebook held a groundbreaking ceremony for its next mega-scale data center in the Village of Los Lunas, New Mexico. Data center construction at the site will be overseen by the general contractor Fortis Construction.

The future data center will be powered by wind and solar energy sourced on Facebook’s behalf by PNM Resources, the company said in a statement.

It will join existing Facebook data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; Altoona, Iowa; and Luleå, Sweden. The company is also building new data centers in Fort Worth, Texas; and Clonee, Ireland.

New Mexico won the project after a period of competition with Utah, which Facebook was also considering. In the end, New Mexico officials managed to convince the social network to make the investment in their state by offering a better tax deal.

CoreSite Brings Online Its Largest Silicon Valley Data Center Yet

Rendering of CoreSite's SV7 data center in Santa Clara, California (Image: CoreSite)

CoreSite Realty Corp. announced the launch of its newest Silicon Valley data center. The 230,000-square foot SV7 facility is the data center provider’s largest in its seven-building San Francisco Bay Area portfolio.

There’s a lot of demand for data center space in all top US data center markets, and Silicon Valley is one of the hottest among them. More than 60 percent of space in the new CoreSite facility has already been leased, the company said in a statement.

SV7 is one of five buildings on its Santa Clara campus, which now totals about 620,000 square feet. CoreSite’s entire seven-building Bay Area portfolio now provides 780,000 square feet total.

Vantage to Break Ground on Sixth Santa Clara Building

Rendering of Vantage Data Centers' future V6 data center in Santa Clara, California (Image: Vantage)

Vantage Data Centers, whose private equity owners are reportedly mulling an exit, is planning a groundbreaking ceremony for the sixth building on its already massive Santa Clara data center campus Thursday. Santa Clara Mayor Lisa Gillmor is expected to be in attendance and a ceremonial demolition of the building that will be replaced with the future V6 data center is planned.

The company is planning to kick off data center construction on its original Santa Clara campus as it is also making plans to start building out a whole new campus on a big piece of land it recently acquired about two miles away.

French Cloud Provider OVH Building in Virginia

French hosting and cloud services firm OVH is building out an existing facility in Virginia’s Fauquier County, which will be its first data center in the US. Investment firms KRR and TowerBrook recently acquired a minority stake in the company, injecting €250 million in capital to fund global expansion.

Virginia officials, including Governor Terry McAuliffe and Secretary of Commerce and Trade Todd Haymore, lauded the company’s decision to make their state home to its first step into the US market. The company expects to invest $47 million in building out the data center and its North American headquarters, according to a statement issued by the governor’s office.

McAuliffe has approved a $1.25 million grant to help Fauquier with the data center construction project. OVH will also be eligible for sales and use tax breaks on equipment, the statement read.

Involta to Build in Pittsburgh

Data center and managed services provider Involta announced data center construction plans in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, which is in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Healthcare provider and insurer UPMC will be Involta’s anchor tenant in the future 40,000-square foot data center.

Once the project is complete, Involta’s total investment in the Pittsburgh metro will total about $16 million, the company said in a statement. Including the future facility, the company’s portfolio will have a total of 14 data centers in secondary US markets.