T5 Data Centers has in a very compact timeframe rung up two noteworthy deals in the North American data center industry -- what features to be quite a big one in booming Metro Atlanta where T5 is headquarted (and, in fact, a big part of the boom); and a strategic one in ever-burgeoning Chicagoland, where T5 is far from a stranger.
Overcoming what it termed "limited acquisition opportunities," T5 this week announced it has acquired a third data center facility in the key Chicago submarket of Northlake in Cook County, southeast of Elk Grove Village (where T5 also operates), just beyond the southern edge of O'Hare International Airport west of downtown Chicago.
"Limited acquisition opportunities" appear to be a thing these days in the Chicago data center market, and nationally, of which some data center operators are taking keen advantage.
Compass Datacenters this summer moved in to raze the former Sears headquarters site in Chicago's Hoffman Estates area, the better to erect a $194 million data center campus.
And erstwhile crypto miner CoreWeave must have felt dashing all over again this summer, yes for its Nvidia-whisperer ways with a GPU cluster, and yes, indeed in dusting off the old Alcatel-Lucent headquarters (later acquired by Lincoln Rackhouse) in Plano, TX for purposes of mass AI infrastructure plug-in activities. But we digress.
With 36 MW of IT capacity, T5's Chicago lll facility will soak up intensifying demand for data center space fed by the area's volume of hyperscale and enterprise customers.
"By strategically locating our new data center in an area facing power constraints, we're providing our clients with state-of-the-art data infrastructure, while contributing to the region's sustainable growth," said David Horowitz, Executive Vice President, Leasing for T5 Data Centers.
T5 said the 36 MW of capacity is a strategic enough chunk to amply enable hyperscale and enterprise tenants' rapidly scaling IT operations, sans power limitations.
T5 further contends that, in employing the latest energy-efficient technologies supporting its "ForeverOn" platform, the new facility automatically reduces customers' operational costs and environmental impact.
Speaking on the acquistion of the Chicago facility, T5's Horowitz added, "It's a testament to our commitment to overcoming challenges and transforming them into opportunities, demonstrating that even in the face of constraints, we can power progress and drive digital transformation with our ForeverOn solutions."
Planning Big in Atlanta
36 MW of capacity is one thing, but T5's recent announcement in Atlanta is of another order of magnitude. As originally reported at the tail-end of September by BISNOW, in a proposed $1.5 billion dollar campus project spanning seven buildings, forecast for delivery by 2030, if approved, T5’s planned second Atlanta campus will be dubbed the T5 - ATL IV Data Center.
BISNOW revealed that, per an application filed with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (the agency charged with evaluating projects incurring a regional impact on infrastructure), T5 is set on developing a 2.95 million SF data center on a 200-acre site about 25 miles south of downtown Atlanta in Coweta County's Lithia Springs.
In recording T5's plans in Coweta County, Data Center Dynamics noted that Lithia Springs is attracting a lot of data centers these days.
As previously reported by Data Center Frontier, T5 Data Centers is a 13-year-old company, and was an early player in the market for build-to-suit wholesale data centers, initially focusing on single-tenant facilities for marquee tenants.
T5 helped establish western North Carolina as a key data center destination, and soon expanded to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Portland, Colorado Springs, suburban New York, Chicago and Ireland.
In 2014 the company launched its T5FM facilities management arm, which gained strong traction, adding 11 new facilities as clients in 2018.
In 2019, T5 Data Centers announced an investment from global real estate company QuadReal Property Group, along with plans to create a platform to provide “holistic” solutions for enterprise and hyperscale users.
QuadReal and T5 at that time set about launching a fully-integrated platform to develop, acquire and operate data centers.
As of last year, T5 Data Centers also operates third-party facility management services in Europe on behalf of a large-scale customer in Denmark.
Matt Vincent
A B2B technology journalist and editor with more than two decades of experience, Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier.
