PowerHouse Data Centers has secured a 30-year lease agreement with CyrusOne for its entire ABX-1 data center in Ashburn, Virginia, the company said today.
The lease provides CyrusOne access to new capacity in the heart of Ashburn's Data Center Alley, where space is at a premium due to utility power constraints. It also marks a strong debut for PowerHouse, the new brand for a joint venture between American Real Estate Partners (AREP) and investor Harrison Street.
ABX-1 is the first construction project PowerHouse has brought to market, The two-story, 265,000 SF ABX-1 powered shell is located at 21529 Beaumeade Circle, a property which was acquired in 2021 and is adjacent to major new campuses for Equinix and Amazon Web Services. It also lies in close proximity to the original Equinix Ashburn campus, which is the center of connectivity in America’s most wired neighborhood.
Most importantly, the site comes with15 megawatts (MWs) of immediately available power, which is important in light of constraints at Dominion Energy, which has limited power availability for new data centers in parts of Data Center Alley. Dominion says it has resumed providing new connections to some data center customers in the area, but power constraints will persist until new transmission infrastructure is completed in 2026.
PowerHouse has worked with Dominion to provide "bridging power" that will enable an additional 7 megawatts of capacity in January, and another 8 megawatts in January 2025. An additional 60 megawatts of power will be available in late 2025, when Dominion completes a new 300 MW substation on the ABX-1 campus.
"We are focused on addressing rising data center demand, and we are fortunate to have a power partner in Dominion Energy that works tirelessly to deliver power solutions to the broader community," said Doug Fleit, co-founder and CEO of AREP and PowerHouse. "We are proud of the partnership we have with CyrusOne at ABX-1. Now more than ever, hyperscalers and operators are looking for real estate solution providers to handle everything from land identification and acquisition to data center design and construction."
ABX-1 is the first of six data centers PowerHouse plans to build in Northern Virginia through 2026, representing 2.1 million square feet of space.
"Northern Virginia is the most active data center market in the world and we are excited to be able to deliver data center solutions to end users and operators such as Cyrus One, to fit-out and support their customers," said Michael Hochanadel, Managing Director and Head of Digital Assets for Harrison Street. "We look forward to working closely with PowerHouse to develop more data centers in the region."
The most high-profile project for PowerHouse will be its redevelopment of the former America Online (AOL) headquarters campus in Ashburn, which was a launchpad for the Internet revolution that swept the country in the early 1990s. The AOL site on Pacific Boulevard will be known as PowerHouse Pacific, and will host three build-to-suit data centers for hyperscale tenants.
The PowerHouse Arcola Data Center project is set for completion in 2026 and will provide 80 MW of critical power for a two-building facility with 364,100 SF of data hall space. The campus will be near Google and Amazon Web Services campuses in the Dulles Cloud Corridor, a fast-growing data center district to the south and west of Dulles Airport.
