CoreSite Opens New Campus in Northern Virginia

CoreSite Realty has opened its new data center campus in Reston, Virginia, providing the company with additional capacity in Northern Virginia, the industry’s largest and most competitive market.

CoreSite plans to add more than 50 megawatts of capacity on the 22-acre property, with the campus eventually slated to reach over 100 megawatts at full build-out. It’s just down the block from the company’s original Northern Virginia campus, which includes two facilities (VA1 and VA2) totaling over 390,000 square feet of data center capacity, with more than 280 customers, including 40 cloud providers, 170 enterprises, and 70 network providers.

“The CoreSite Reston campus provides customers cloud connectivity and delivers the highest security and performance, low latency, with the lowest cost of cloud service utilization,” said Juan Font, CoreSite Senior Vice President. “We are in a position to deliver the maximum degree of scale, operational flexibility and performance throughout the entire lifecycle of customers’ digital transformation journey.”

The campus is key to CoreSite’s ambitions in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market. CoreSite has taken a different approach than many of its competitors with its focus on Reston rather than Ashburn, home to a cluster of facilities in “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County, where there is still open land for development. It’s a different story in Reston, where CoreSite deploys megawatts of data center space in a busy office and industrial corridor adjacent to Dulles Airport and the Reston Metro station.

CoreSite is repurposing several existing buildings on the Sunrise Technology Park, an office park that housed four buildings totaling 315,000 square feet. The company initially envisioned creating about 660,000 square feet of space at the new campus, but has since expanded its vision for the site, perhaps prompted by the spectacular growth of cloud computing in Northern Virginia, where data center providers leased a record 270 megawatts of capacity last year.

Most of Northern Virginia’s data center capacity is distributed across Loudoun and Prince William counties, which are home to nearly 100 data centers and more than 10 million square feet of data center space. CoreSite is the largest data center player in Fairfax County, and local officials see its expansion as important to the county’s economic development.

CoreSite’s strategy is to develop multi-tenant ecosystems in major markets, creating a campus environment with multiple facilities operating as one. That often involves making the most of infill locations – parcels of land in close proximity to its existing data centers. In major markets with limited development sites, that may mean working with smaller pieces of land and building vertically.

The new CoreSite campus design includes a four-story infrastructure tower, which centralizes the mechanical and electrical equipment supporting the first two buildings on the campus. Placing the chillers, UPS systems, electrical switchgear and cooling towers in their own facility allows CoreSite to create larger data halls in its new buildings, making the most of every square foot of customer space.