Compass Datacenters has purchased property for a new data center campus in Toronto, the leading business and financial hub in Canada. Compass plans to invest $100 million in the first phase of development, which will bring 10 megawatts of capacity online later this year.
The acquisition is the latest chapter in an ambitious expansion by Compass, which entered the Quebec market last year with its acquisition of ROOT Data Center. The new development provides the company with footprints in Canada’s largest hyperscale market (Montreal) and financial market (Toronto).
“Toronto is the latest step in our effort to expand in key markets across North America,” said Chris Crosby, the CEO of Compass Datacenters. “Along with our Montreal facilities, this new campus provides our customers diverse deployment regions in eastern Canada, helping us deliver capacity where and when our customers need it.”
The new campus in Etobicoke is just 15 km from 151 Front Street, Canada’s largest carrier hotel, and features diverse fiber routes from multiple fiber providers. The first building will be a tetrofit of an existing structure previously used for storage and logistics, and will support 27 megawatts of critical IT load. Compass says the building works well for a data center conversion with limited modification, and has set an aggressive construction schedule, with the first 10MW scheduled to be deployed in the third quarter of 2020.
“This $100 million phase one demonstrates our commitment to Toronto,” said AJ Byers, President, International of Compass Datacenters (and former CEO of ROOT). “Our customers see Toronto as an emerging, important hyperscale market. This project validates our ability to rapidly deliver capacity to meet customer’s aggressive timelines today and in the future.”
Last year Compass’ investors – RedBird Capital and the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund – joined with Israeli real estate firm Azrieli Group on an investment round that enabled Compass to build bigger, enter new markets, and acquisition companies, land and executives to execute its vision. The result is a company with offerings extending from the edge to the cloud, including everything from micro-modular data centers to hyperscale deployments.
The Compass vision is to “make lives better by providing the world’s technology leaders a secure place to plug in wherever they grow.” That mission statement takes on new resonance amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in which digital infrastructure is the critical connector between a socially distant society and the businesses and activities that sustain it.
Compass creates scalable building blocks of data center capacity, employing a standard design and pre-fabricated components to control cost and speed to market. Tenants can choose from a menu of options to personalize each facility, with choices on the site, building, data hall, mechanical/electrical infrastructure, security and the building management system.
In 2015 Compass adapted its design to pursue hyperscale customers, supporting larger building blocks and higher-density workloads. Compass is now developing large campuses in the hottest hyperscale markets – Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Montreal and most recently Dallas.
Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.