QTS Acquires McGraw Hill’s New Jersey Data Center for $75M

QTS Realty Trust has bought a data center in East Windsor, New Jersey, for $75 million from McGraw Hill Financial.

The financial services firm will continue to occupy the data center as a tenant and customer of QTS services. It signed a 10-year lease with QTS, which includes a 15-year extension option.

This type of deal is commonly referred to as a “sales-leaseback transaction,” where a facility’s owner sells it but continues to use it, essentially transferring the responsibility of data center management to a specialist.

In this case, however, McGraw Hill is effetively outsourcing data center services to two companies. As part of the announcement, QTS said it had partnered with French IT outsourcing firm Atos, and the two companies would provide services to the tenant together.

QTS will provide the data center and data center management services, while Atos will provide IT outsourcing. Technically, QTS will be providing its services to Atos, which will combine them with its own services in a comprehensive package it will deliver to McGraw Hill.

QTS indicated that the partnership with Atos will extend beyond the New Jersey data center.

The data center itself is a fairly large facility that came with a low price tag. The building’s total size is 560,000 square feet, and the data center floor measures about 58,000 square feet.

Its total current power capacity is 12 megawatts, which QTS said could be expanded to 20 MW. The building can also accommodate an expansion of the raised floor area to 100,000 square feet.

The facility also comes with a massive (50-acre) “solar field,” whose power generation capacity is 14.1 MW, according to QTS.

QTS CEO Chad Williams said the deal was consistent with the company’s strategy to grow its business with enterprise customers by buying large facilities in strategic markets.

“We focus on infrastructure rich facilities, acquired at a low basis, with significant capacity to continue to support our growth in a low-risk, cost-efficient model,” he said.