QTS Realty Trust (NYSE: QTS), which offers data center, managed hosting, and cloud services internationally, says it has begun building a mega data center campus in Ashburn, VA to support national Tier 1 data center market expansion.
Since the end of the 2017 second quarter, QTS has agreed to acquire 52 acres of land in Ashburn in two parcels for a total of $53 million. QTS says construction on the first 24-acre parcel, which was purchased for $17 million, has begun. The second 28-acre parcel was purchased for $36 million. The combined site is located adjacent to the current QTS Vault campus in Dulles, VA. The company expects that the new combined site can support more than 700,000 square feet of raised floor capacity and 140 MW of gross power.
QTS has pre-leased more than 50% of Phase 1 development capacity to a global health insurance provider. The company says it is considering several potential customers, and plans on signing additional pre-lease commitments before the Phase 1 development is finished. With approximately 4 MW of sellable capacity, the company expects Phase 1 of its multi-tenant development to be available by mid-2018.
"We are excited to have additional sellable capacity in a strategic QTS market to expand our ecosystem of more than 130 customers currently supported within our Northern Virginia footprint," said Chad Williams, QTS chairman and CEO. "Our fully-integrated 3C platform, combined with mega data center scale, position QTS to take advantage of increasing hybrid IT requirements, particularly from hyperscale companies."
Since the end of the second quarter of 2017, QTS also acquired 84 acres of land in Phoenix, AZ for $25 million, approximately five miles from QTS' existing data center in Phoenix. Additionally, it acquired 92 acres of land in Hillsboro, OR for $26 million.
Earlier this year, QTS offered 400-Gbps data center interconnect (DCI) through its hyperConnect platform between a new data center in Chicago and the city's Lakeside Technology Center at 350 East Cermak (see "QTS offers 400-Gbps data center interconnect in Chicago").
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