Exclusive: Sabey Breaks Ground on Quincy Data Center

Sabey Data Centers has kicked off construction of a second massive data center on its Quincy, Washington, campus. Construction crews broke ground last week, the company’s president John Sabey said.

Quincy is one of the state’s primary data center markets. In addition to data center providers like Sabey and Vantage, tech giants like Dell, Microsoft, and Yahoo have data centers there.

Based in Seattle, Sabey is one of the biggest data center landlords in Washington. In addition to Quincy, it has large data center facilities in Seattle and Wenatchee. The company also has data centers in New York City and Ashburn, Virginia.

Sabey’s existing building in Quincy is nearly full, but there is lots of demand in the market, so the company is racing to bring more capacity online to take advantage of the opportunity. It has already pre-leased close to 1 megawatt of capacity in the future data center, John Sabey said.

The new facility will be about 135,000 square feet in size, with ability to support 10.5 megawatts of IT load total. Sabey expects the first 2.7-megawatt pod to come online in October.

Once the second building is completed, there will be more than 400,000 square feet of data center space on campus total. The site also has enough space and power capacity for a third building.

Site plan of Sabey's Intergate.Quincy campus. The existing data center is Building C, and the one that is currently under construction is Building A. (Image courtesy of Sabey Data Centers)

Even though internet giants Microsoft and Amazon Web Services have headquarters not too far from Quincy, they do not contribute to the demand for data center space from companies like Sabey. With a few exceptions, companies like that have switched from leasing space to building and operating their own data centers for their primary capacity.

Smaller, more traditional enterprises that are not in need of web-scale data center infrastructure are in the market. “Basically. every [industry] vertical is looking in Quincy,” Sabey said. Companies in healthcare, financial services, entertainment, internet, and education are shopping for data center space in the market.

Quincy, and Washington State in general, are attractive for data center operators for a number of reasons. There is a big supply of low-cost hydropower; there is little risk of natural disaster; there are sales tax breaks on data center equipment purchases, including IT and supporting infrastructure.

The deals that are being shopped around vary in size. Some are as small as 15 kilowatts, while others are in the multi-megawatt category, Sabey said.

Like elsewhere around the country, there is more demand today for multiple levels of infrastructure redundancy in the same data center. Today’s customers are smarter about matching each application’s uptime requirements with infrastructure it is being hosted on to optimize their data center cost.

To respond to this trend Sabey included ability to support varying levels of redundancy in the design of the new facility. “We have the ability, through our design, to actually provide customers with varying resiliency within the same suites,” the company’s president said.