LEESBURG, Va. – RagingWire Data Centers has begun building an additional 500,000 square feet of space in Ashburn, Virginia. The expansion was announced by RagingWire Director of Marketing Jim Leach at the recent CAPRE Mid-Atlantic Data Center Summit.
Leach said RagingWire has begun work on two new buildings – known as VA4 and VA5 – on its newest data center campus in Ashburn, in the heart of Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, where nearly all the industry’s leading players are building new facilities to meet unprecedented demand from cloud computing providers.
The expansion positions RagingWire to continue to compete for deals in Ashburn, where the ability to deliver data center capacity quickly is an important requirement. Over the past several years, RagingWire has been retooling its data center construction operation to accelerate its deployment capabilities.
VA4 and VA5 will be nearly twins, with each two-story building containing 253,000 square feet of space. Construction on VA4 is underway and scheduled for completion in summer 2019. RagingWire will also lay the concrete pad and complete other site work for VA5, which will be available within six to nine months of a customer commitment.
RagingWire did not announce any new customer wins, but like many data center providers, it typically doesn’t start construction without a commitment from an anchor tenant.
Creating a Flexible Data Center Campus
The plans for VA4 and VA5 reflect the evolution of RagingWire’s data center design as it focuses on a mix of enterprise and hyperscale users.
In its first two Ashburn facilities, RagingWire built its data center infrastructure inside existing powered shells, with its vaults (data halls) averaging 2 megawatts in capacity. With its new campus, RagingWire has shifted to greenfield construction, customized from the ground up to support the company’s vision for Internet-scale campuses. The new Ashburn campus is designed to support seven interconnected buildings housing 1.5 million square foot of data center space.
The first building, VA3, featured a mix of vault designs, offering flexible sizing options from 2 megawatts to 6 megawatts of power capacity for enterprises seeking wholesale data center suites, as well as a large room for multi-tenant retail colocation.
