Iron Mountain Data Centers continues to expand its global footprint. The company has acquired properties in Phoenix and Madrid, and plans to build large new data centers on both sites.
In the Phoenix market, Iron Mountain has acquired a 10-acre property next to its existing campus in Phoenix, which already houses two data centers. The property includes a 50 MVA substation, with the ability to expand to 100 MVA. The company plans to build a 36-megawatt data center on the new property, with about 230,000 square feet of space.
""This is an important expansion in a key market,, as our current 89 megawatt AZP campus is nearly fully leased or committed," said Bill Meaney, the CEO of Iron Mountain.
Phoenix is in the midst of a data center building boom, and is drawing some of the biggest names in hyperscale computing. The Phoenix data center market is home to hundreds of megawatts of potential data center capacity, and demand is growing.
Iron Mountain is also acquiring Xdata Properties and its campus in Madrid. The property has an existing 3 megawatt data center, but has land and power available for up to 89 megawatts of additional capacity. The data center campus is located in San Fernando (“Corredor del Henares”), an emerging industrial area in close proximity to main communication networks for the city of Madrid, and has direct access to the Madrid-Barcelona fiber route, the largest fiber highway on the Iberian peninsula.
"We are really bullish about that market," said Meaney. "Madrid is a market we have wanted to get into for some time. It's not power constrained, like so many other markets in Europe. It also comes with a pipeline of activity from our existing customers who are interested in that market."
Xdata had been seeking an investor, as parent Stoneshield Capital was reported tp have engaged Morgan Stanley and CBRE to line up new capital.
Iron Mountain’s data center operations are a growing segment of its business. The company was founded in 1951 to store papers and microfilm in a former underground mine, and has grown into the world’s leading provider of document storage, with more than 225,000 customers and a real estate network spanning 85 million square feet and 1,400 facilities.
In a profile earlier this year, we noted that the company has “emerged as a larger force on the data center landscape, building beyond its base of enterprise document storage customers.”
The transactions were announced as part of Iron Mountain's earnings call for the third quarter. The company reported 7 megawatts of new leasing in the quarter, raising its total for the year to125 MWs. Its total data center footprint now stands at 670 MWs and growing.
"We're going from strength to strength," said Meaney. "We remain extremely bullish on our data center business. We don't see any change in terms of our pipeline and leasing activity.
