STACK Infrastructure has acquired a data center near the growing cloud cluster in New Albany, Ohio, the company said today. The new site is the seventh market for STACK Infrastructure, and highlights the strategic importance of Ohio as a destination for data centers.
New Albany is a suburb of Columbus, Ohio that is home to a data center campus for Amazon Web Services, while Facebook is creating a 1.5 million square foot, three-building campus just down the road. Earlier this year Google announced plans for a $600 million data center campus near the Facebook project.
New Albany is also home to a group of enterprise data centers, including facilities for Discover Financial Services, PCM, an American Electric Power (AEP) facility (built by Compass Datacenters), and a Nationwide Insurance data center. The area is home to 15 Fortune 1000 headquarters, while 30 other enterprise companies have major operations in the area.
STACK said it has acquired a campus with an existing purpose-built, Tier III data center and 17 acres for future data center development. STACK said only that the seller was a “Fortune 1000 company” headquartered in Ohio.
In concept, the new project appears similar to the development of the STACK campus in Elk Grove Village in the Chicago market, which was acquired with leasable existing data center capacity, as well as adjacent land where STACK is now developing a 20 megawatt data center.
Growth Continues in Midwest
STACK Infrastructure was formed by investor IPI Data Center Partners with assets acquired from Infomart Data Centers and T5 Data Centers, giving it a national footprint spanning 1.5 million feet of space and 100 megawatts of capacity. The company has data centers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon.
With its new campus in Ohio, STACK can offer proximity to three major hyperscale campuses, as well as other connected facilities in the Columbus region, which is now home to about 30 data centers.
Ohio is part of a data center building boom that is pumping billions of dollars into towns across America’s heartland. Five large cloud companies – Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook – are investing more than $15 billion to build massive server farms across Iowa, Ohio and Nebraska.
STACK said the New Albany area represent a premier growth market for cloud and enterprise data centers, offering competitive power costs, a favorable tax climate, skilled labor pool, and low risk of natural disasters.
Target ‘The Golden Triangle’
The company said the expansion builds on its strategy of adding capacity in the “Golden Triangle,” a geographic area linking Northern Virginia, Northern New Jersey, and Chicago, where the majority of data transmission in the U.S. occurs, resulting in robust fiber optic and electrical infrastructure.
“We’re very excited to expand our footprint into this strategic market as it gains momentum in the data center world,” said Brian Cox, the CEO of STACK. “A location of choice for many data center, cloud, and enterprise entities, New Albany and the Golden Triangle offer a highly valuable range of benefits for STACK’s current and future clients. As we have considered expansion options, this market has remained a priority due to its unique combination of reliable power, robust data fiber networks, proximity to more than half of the U.S. population and the resulting lower latency.”
STACK’s strategy features a combination of “rack-ready” wholesale space for immediate delivery (Ready STACK), rapid development of powered shell data halls for larger requirements (Power STACK), and build-to-suit projects for entire campuses (Hyper STACK).
In February STACK lined up $850 million to finance the growth of its data center infrastructure. The funds will be used for expanding STACK’s existing data centers and expanding into new markets, the company said. The STACK funding will use securitized notes, a strategy which allows the company to borrow money at a lower interest rate.
