CoreSite Realty will pay $60 million to buy the Sunrise Technology Park in Reston, Virginia, which the company will redevelop as a data center campus. The acquisition will provide CoreSite with space to expand its Reston data center operations, as the Sunrise property is just a quarter mile from the company’s existing campus.
The deal continues the land grab underway in major data center markets as developers seek to lock down properties for future development. It’s an important milestone for CoreSite, which is nearing capacity at its Reston data center campus and needed to secure additional space to continue to compete for large-footprint deals in Northern Virginia, one of the favored destinations for cloud computing providers to house their servers.
“CoreSite’s expansion in the Reston market is an important step in the execution of our strategy,” said Tom Ray, President and Chief Executive Officer of CoreSite. “With the planned acquisition, we believe that CoreSite will be well-positioned for sustained growth in the important Northern Virginia market.
“We believe that the planned acquisition of the STP site will provide opportunities for CoreSite to continue its successful history of providing build-to-suit and wholesale data center solutions for customers with larger requirements,” Ray added.
More Space for Reston Data Center
Sunrise Technology Park is a 22-acre office park that currently hosts four buildings totaling 315,000 square feet. CoreSite expects to build over 660,000 square feet of new data center capacity across multiple phases on the site, investing $400 to $500 million in the process.
CoreSite hopes to begin the Sunrise redevelopment by mid-2017 and complete Phase I by early 2018. The first phase will have three components:
- Redeveloping an existing 48,000 square-foot industrial building for data center use.
- Building a ground-up 92,000 square-foot data center shell.
- Building a 92,000 square-foot structure to house centralized infrastructure intended to support the full buildout of the campus.
CoreSite’s existing Reston data center campus includes two facilities totaling over 390,000 square feet of turn-key data center capacity. The camps hosts has more than 175 customers, including 35 networks and over 50 cloud and IT service providers.
Once the full 660,000 square feet of new capacity at the Sunrise Technology Park site is completed, CoreSite’s capacity at its Reston campus to over 1 million square feet.
Land Buys Continue in NoVa
Data center developers continue to buy up land and properties in Northern Virginia, seeking to keep pace with unprecedented levels of demand for server space for cloud computing providers. In recent months COPT, DBT Data and CyrusOne have all acquired properties in Northern Virginia for data center projects to support cloud growth.
It’s just the latest round of development in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley.” The area around the Internet connectivity hub in Ashburn is already home to more than 60 data centers, with 6 million square feet of data center space in Loudoun County and another 2 million square feet in Prince William County.
There’s at least another 3 million square feet of cloud data centers under development, including new projects in the pipeline for Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros Technology, Equinix, RagingWire, Sabey and INFOMART.
