EdgeCore Enters Northern Virginia Market, Plans Huge Campus in Sterling

ASHBURN, Va. – EdgeCore Internet Real Estate has become the latest entrant in the Northern Virginia data center market, announcing plans for a major campus in Sterling. The company says it will build 144 megawatts of wholesale data center space on a 36-acre property near Route 28.

EdgeCore launched in February with plans to build large data center campuses in six North American markets. The new company is led by former CoreSite CEO and Tom Ray, and its lead financial backer is GIC, the sovereign wealth fund for the government of Singapore. The company says it has the capital to develop more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity.

In Northern Virginia, EdgeCore plans to build four data centers totaling 720,000 square feet of data center space in Sterling, which is home to a growing nexus of data center providers. Each building will be 180,000 square feet and support 36 megawatts of critical load.

The company is already working to deploy capacity in three markets – Mesa, Arizona; Reno, Nevada and Richardson, Texas. EdgeCore is building big, as it plans to build more than 3 million square feet of data center space and 615 megawatts of critical power capacity across its three initial markets.

“Our entry into Northern Virginia represents our fourth market over the past six months and we remain focused upon entering additional markets over the next year,” said Ray.  “We are pleased to be on track in executing against our plan. We will continue to work hard to deliver upon the breadth and depth of scale, along with just-in-time delivery capabilities, our customers require. ”

A Flood of  New Players in Northern Virginia

Northern Virginia is already the world’s largest concentration of cloud computing infrastructure, and EdgeCore joins a growing crowd of new players entering the market in recent months. Earlier this week Aligned Energy just announced announced plans for a 180-megawatt campus in Ashburn. CloudHQ, Iron Mountain and Element Critical entered the Northern Virginia market in 2017, and Vantage Data Centers, Compass Datacenters and QTS Data Centers have all jumped into the market with large new campuses scheduled to open in 2018 and 2019.

The incumbents are also adding capacity. Digital Realty is creating several enormous new campuses, while RagingWire, CoreSite, Sabey Data Centers, Equinix and CyrusOne are all adding new capacity.

“Data centers are the engine of innovation.” said Buddy Rizer, Executive Director of Economic Development for Loudoun County. “They enable a lot of other businesses. This year in Loudoun County we will have a quarter billion dollars of tax revenue from data centers.”

Fourth Market for EdgeCore

EdgeCore launched with more than $800 million of equity, which it will leverage to invest $2 billion in data center development, the company said. GIC’s financial partners include Denver-based Mount Elbert Capital Partners and OPTrust, one of Canada’s largest pension funds. Mount Elbert is led by Ray, who will be the chairman and CEO of EdgeCore.

Ray is one of the most experienced executives in the data center sector. As a managing director at The Carlyle Group, in 2001 Ray helped create the CRG West colocation business, which later became CoreSite and went public through an IPO. He retired as CEO of CoreSite in 2016.

EdgeCore plans to immediately commence site work and the installation of utility infrastructure at its location on the northwest corner of Atlantic Boulevard and Nokes Boulevard in Sterling, adjacent to the Dulles Town Center Mall. The site is near existing data center campuses for CyrusOne and Amazon Web Services. EdgeCore plans to offer space as either powered shell or turn-key data center space, depending on tenant preference. EdgeCore says it will use lithuium-ion batteries in its UPS systems, and will offer a variety of configurations for power chain redundancy, including 2N, N+1 and N power.

EdgeCore expects to substantially complete the first phase of turn-key capacity at its Phoenix, Arizona campus in the first quarter of 2019.

Explore the evolving world of edge computing further through Data Center Frontier’s special report series and ongoing coverage.