Stack Infrastructure Plots Second, Massive Hyperscale Campus in Northern Virginia

Stack Infrastructure, a one-year-old wholesale data center provider, announced that it's working with Fairfax, Virginia-based real estate developer Peterson Companies to build a new data center campus in Manassas, Virginia. Stack already has a data center at another site in Northern Virginia: a 180,000-square foot, 18MW facility in Ashburn, about 20 miles north of the newly planned campus.

On the drawing board for the new location is a 125-acre campus for build-to-suit facilities that are expected to eventually top four million square feet of floor space with 250MW of available power for hyperscalers and enterprises. The first phase, which begins immediately, calls for construction of a 25-acre campus, anchored by a 700,000-square foot, 72MW data center.

The company is hoping for completion of this first phase by year's end.

Northern Virginia is considered to be the largest and most important data center market in the world, and it's not surprising that Stack is keen to expand its footprint there. After a few years' of leasing frenzy by hyperscale cloud platforms, the market slowed down in 2019, but developers and real-estate brokers expect it to get back to rapid growth, once the hyperscalers "digest" all the capacity they leased in the prior years.

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"This new development exemplifies our ongoing focus on ensuring that Stack stands ready to rapidly deliver capacity to our clients in key markets," Matt VanderZanden, Stack's chief strategy officer, said in a statement. "In partnership with one of the most experienced developers in the DC region, Peterson, and with four pad-ready sites in the Prince William County data center overlay zone, we believe the ability to offer large-scale build-to-suit projects to support immediate demand is compelling."

Stack, with data centers in seven US markets, was born in January, 2019 after IPI Data Center Partners purchased what remained of Infomart Data Centers after owner ASB Real Estate Investments sold the Dallas Infomart to Equinix for $800 million in early 2018. The remaining Infomart centers were then combined with some of IPI's T5 data centers to form Stack Infrastructure.

That was followed eight months later by the announcement that Stack had purchased an existing 113,000-square foot, 2.4MW data center on 17 acres of land in New Albany, Ohio, an emerging hyperscale market where Amazon Web Services has been operating a facility since 2016, and where Facebook and Google have projects either under construction or on the drawing board.

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Ashburn, in Loudoun County, is the market's epicenter, referred to as "Data Center Alley." However, with a shortage of suitable land for data center construction, and with the parcels that are available commanding sky-high prices as a result, data center construction has been spilling over in neighboring counties, such as Prince William.

"Prince William County offers robust power infrastructure and low-latency connectivity within one of the densest concentrations of fiber networks in the world," Stack's CEO, Brian Cox said. "This, in combination with the low total costs of ownership available in this market, enables us to offer an especially attractive value proposition to clients."