STACK Infrastructure has acquired 79 acres of land for a data center campus in Avondale, Arizona, which could grow to as much as 150 megawatts of capacity and 1 million square feet of build-out, the company said today.
The project is the latest in a cluster of data centers planned for the area around the Phoenix Goodyear Airport about 20 miles west of Downtown Phoenix. The Avondale Techplex offers significant opportunities for large-scale projects, low risk for natural disasters, and solar resources for sustainable power. Avondale borders Goodyear, which has several data center campuses under development.
“STACK sees tremendous potential in Phoenix,” said Brian Cox, Chief Executive Officer of STACK. “The access to power, fiber, and land provides outstanding opportunity for scale, and the State of Arizona and City of Avondale teams are true partners. This new market is one of the nation’s most important hyperscale availability zones and will afford our clients unparalleled access to scalable capacity, renewable energy and sustained growth in the southwest.”
The Phoenix project continues the rapid expansion for STACK, which was formed in early 2019 and will now have a footprint in eight U.S. markets.
Big Growth Ahead for Phoenix Cloud Cluster
STACK’s announcement underscores the potentially massive cloud growth ahead for the Phoenix data center market, where developers have more than 1 gigawatt of capacity in the works, which is more than any market in the U.S., save Northern Virginia.
The STACK project adds to the development action to the West of Phoenix, where the small town of Goodyear (just north of Avondale) has emerged as a data center destination. Microsoft recently bought land in Goodyear for a major cloud availability zone, while Compass Datacenters, Stream Data Centers and Vantage Data Centers have all bought property in Goodyear for future campuses.
While the Goodyear/Avondale area is primed for data center development to the west of Phoenix, a similar suburban hotspot is emerging east of Phoenix in Mesa, where EdgeCore has opened its first facility and Google, CyrusOne, Digital Realty, NTT Global (RagingWire) and EdgeConneX have all purchased land in Mesa to expand their footprint.
For now, these visions of massive data centers remain largely on the horizon.
Eyes on the Hyperscale Market
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, Oregon and Ohio.
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).
“Construction timelines are still under internal development right now, depending on emerging client needs/requests,” STACK told Data Center Frontier. “We’re working with a number of stakeholders to identify an appropriate schedule and then take every available opportunity to accelerate construction.”
Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.