GI Buys ViaWest Data Center in Dallas Market

GI Partners, a San Francisco-based investment firm with a focus on data centers, has acquired a data center and office property in the Dallas market, adjacent to a University of Texas at Dallas campus. The data center portion is occupied by ViaWest, the data center provider GI sold to Canada's Shaw Communications in 2014 for $1.2 billion.

The 300,000-square-foot Synergy Park facility in Richardson, one of the major data center hotspots in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has about 50,000 square feet of data center space.

The office space is leased to university affiliates, GI said, noting that a "data center solutions provider" was leasing the data center portion of the facility but stopped short of naming the provider. ViaWest, however, advertises a Synergy Park data center in Richardson on its website.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

GI made the acquisition through DataCore, a $500 million real estate fund it manages on behalf of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS.

GI principal Mike Armstrong said the facility was attractive because of the data center and infrastructure inside. It was also attractive because of its adjacency to the university. “The Dallas MSA remains one of the most dynamic data center markets in the country, bolstered by a strong, growing economy,” he said in a statement.

The year started off with a lot of data center sale activity. Verizon has reportedly kicked off the process to auction some $2.5 billion worth of data center assets; DuPont Fabros Technology announced plans to sell its NJ1 data center in New Jersey and get out of the New Jersey market altogether; and Mayo Clinic has sold a data center in Rochester, Minnesota, to Epic Systems.