Colocation Startup CentralColo Buys Northern Virginia Data Center

A joint venture involving Silicon Valley-based data center provider CentralColo has acquired a large Northern Virginia data center and office complex from real estate investor The Meridian Group. Meridian announced the deal in December.

The deal marks entry into a second top-tier data center market for CentralColo, a young company that launched its first data center in Sunnyvale, California, in 2015. Its joint-venture partner on the $96 million deal was Legacy Investing, a Northern Virginia-based real estate investment firm, Virginia Business reported.

Anchor tenants on the 280,000-square foot campus in Vienna – a town just outside Washington, D.C. – are defense technology company Leidos and the General Services Administration. Called Tysons Technology Center, the campus includes a nearly 200,000-square foot office and data center building and an 80,000-square foot office building. The property is 90 percent leased.

CentralColo, which provides retail and wholesale data center services, was founded in 2015 by Arman Khalili, a long-time internet infrastructure executive and entrepreneur. The company was founded with investment from Industry Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm where Khalili acts as a principal.

Last year, CentralColo received an undisclosed but “significant” investment from Safanad Limited, a Dubai-based investment manager, to fund its growth strategy. Around the same time, the company appointed Ken Parent, founder and former CEO of data center provider ByteGrid, as its chief executive.

One publicly disclosed customer at CentralColo’s 94,000-square foot Silicon Valley data center is Packet, a bare-metal cloud provider catering to developers with high-performance computing requirements.