T5 Closes $55.5M Credit for Oregon Data Center Construction

T5 Data Centers has secured a $55.5 million credit facility to finance its data center construction project in Hillsboro, a Pacific coast city that’s part of the Portland metro. The secured credit facility was provided by CIT Bank, subsidiary of the U.S. financial holding giant CIT Group.

The announcement comes the same week QTS Realty Trust said it had raised $100 million in credit to finance data center construction, both deals signaling a healthy debt market for data center providers.

T5 started construction of its two-building data center campus in Hillsboro in September – two years after it bought a 15 acre property there and announced plans to build the campus. This September, the company said it had secured an unnamed anchor tenant that would take one of the future buildings in its entirety.

Joe Junda, managing director of CIT Corporate Finance, said T5 had a strong management team and a solid track record, and that Portland had strong data center demand.

“T5 Data Centers is a leading and experienced wholesale data center owner and operator with a strong management team,” Junda said in a statement. “Portland has a proven demand for data centers and should be an excellent location for this new facility.”

Portland metro’s abundance of low-cost electricity and network connectivity options have made it one of the hottest data center markets in the country.

There are submarine cable landing stations in six towns along the coast, one of which is Hillsboro, according to TeleGeography. Cables that land there offer direct connectivity to countries in the Asia Pacific region, Alaska, Northern California, and Southern California.

There are more landing stations in and outside of Seattle, which is about 170 miles north of Portland.

Other data center wholesalers, Digital Realty Trust and Fortune Data Centers, have data centers in Hillsboro. Major retail colocation players in the market include Telx and ViaWest.

Some high-profile data center users there are Intel, NetApp, and Adobe.

T5’s other data centers are in New York, North Carolina, Atlanta, Dallas, and Colorado.