CyrusOne Confirms Plans for 50MW Atlanta Data Center Campus

CyrusOne continues to add new data center capacity, and lots of it. This week the company confirmed that it will build a large data center campus near Atlanta, which is quickly becoming a major hub for new development.

CyrusOne plans to build a 44-acre campus in the Atlanta suburb of Douglasville, that will house three data centers, with 440,000 square feet of data center space and 50 megawatts of critical power. Construction is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2018 with completion of the first data center planned for the summer of 2018. That schedule is consistent with CyrusOne’s focus on swift construction that can deliver data centers in as little as six months.

“Atlanta’s diverse economy moves fast and CyrusOne operates in the same manner,” said Tesh Durvasula, chief commercial officer, CyrusOne. “Our new Douglasville site is an ideal location for companies fueling Atlanta’s growth to leverage CyrusOne’s state-of-the-art data center solution in this dynamic region.”

Atlanta Sees Burst of Development

The CyrusOne expansion reflects the emergence of Atlanta as a significant data center market. The city has always supported an active colocation business and enterprise data centers, with QTS Data Centers emerging as the largest data center provider. But the arrival of CyrusOne and Switch, which is also planning a campus in Douglas County, signals growing confidence that Atlanta can now support wholesale data centers, and perhaps hyperscale players.

Earlier this year Switch announced plans to invest $2.5 billion to build more than 1 million square feet of data center space on a new campus near Atlanta called The Keep. The Switch and CyrusOne announcements are among a flurry of recent expansions and acquisitions in the Atlanta market:

• Digital Realty, the world’s largest data center landlord, has expanded its presence downtown by adding 18,000 square feet of raised-floor colocation space in 250 Williams, a multi-tenant data center facility in downtown Atlanta.
• Several months after Digital Realty announced its expansion in the building, 250 Williams was acquired by data center REIT Carter Validus for $166 million.
• Serverfarm has recently acquired a 153,000 square foot facility in Suwannee, Georgia that had been owned by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
• Ascent Corp. entered the Atlanta market this spring through a sale/leaseback deal with an enterprise tenant. The ATL1 facility is a 185,000 square foot building on a 38-acre secure site in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. A tenant occupies two data halls, but there is up to 8 MW of server-ready space, with the ability to add another 75,000 square feet of capacity if needed.
• In May, Lincoln Rackhouse said that it was acquiring a data center in the Atlanta market through another sale/leaseback agreement with a corporate tenant.
• Colocation provider Green House Data continued to build its national footprint with the April 27 acquisition of Cirracore, an Atlanta-based infrastructure provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and hybrid cloud products. The deal brings Green House Data a strong presence in the Southeast, including a presence inside two Equinix facilities in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, QTS Data Centers maintains a massive data center in downtown as well as the suburb of Suwannee. The company is focusing on designs for hyperscale data center space,  as well as its hybrid IT offering that spans colocation, cloud and wholesale offerings.

Investing $200 Million

“Georgia is an established innovation hub and this announcement speaks to the value of our technology sector in generating new economic opportunities,” said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal. “We appreciate CyrusOne’s investment in Georgia and share in the company’s vision for future growth. By establishing this new data center campus in the Silicon Valley of the South, CyrusOne will benefit from our proven record of connectivity and a workforce that is second to none.”

This is one half of the 60,000 square foot data hall inside the CyrusOne Sterling V data center in Northern Virginia. (Photo: Rich Miller)

“Atlanta has become a nexus for data in the Southeastern U.S.,” said Robert Jackson, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary for CyrusOne. “The enthusiasm our customers have for expanding in the diversified, thriving economy of Georgia makes Douglasville an ideal locale for CyrusOne’s continued growth.”

CyrusOne will invest $200 million over the next seven years at the campus at Riverside West Industrial Park, and is expected to create 47 jobs, including 38 jobs at businesses that locate at the data center, and nine full-time positions at CyrusOne.

CyrusOne is building big and building fast. The company is on the forefront of a trend in which the world’s largest hyperscale Internet companies have begun leasing cloud capacity from data center developers, rather than building their own server farms.

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This trend is reshaping the market for wholesale data center space, as developers battle for mammoth “super-wholesale” leases that take down up to 35 megawatts of cloud capacity in a single transaction.

These huge deals help hyperscalers keep pace with the rapid growth of their cloud operations, which has tested the limits of their in-house construction units. Leading wholesale data center providers  have optimized their designs and supply chains to deliver lots of space, as quickly as possible. The company now operates 44 data centers in 30 locations worldwide, supporting more than 3.8 million square feet of space.