Huge T-Mobile Lease at New Sabey Project

T-Mobile will lease 200,000 square feet of space at Intergate.Columbia, the Sabey Corp. data center project in East Wenatchee, Washington, according to local media. T-Mobile is the first tenant announced for the Sabey facility, which is projected to have a project cost of more than $100 million.

The primary T-Mobile' data center in Bothell, Washington was flooded last month when torrential rains hit the Seattle area. The outage knocked the T-mobile website offline and disrupted new customer activations nationwide. Bothell is more vulnerable to flooding than other data center hubs in the Seattle area. East Wenatchee is in an area of central Washington that has seen a boom in data centers since 2006, when Microsoft announced a major new facility in Quincy to support its new online services.

Sabey announced the East Wenatchee data center project in August 2006. The company's plans call for two data centers totaling approximately 380,000 square feet of space, along with a 75,000 square foot office building. The project is scheduled for completion late this year or in early 2009.

The Douglas County Public Utility District recently completed a power substation to supply the data center. Sabey has arranged for up to 30 megawatts of electricity from the PUD, and will pay for about 80 percent of the substation's estimated $7.9 million cost, according to PUD officials.

Sabey Corporation has built and currently operates some of the largest data centers in the country, including Seattle's 76-acre Intergate technology campus, one of the nation's largest multi-tenant Internet complexes, along with other past operations in Los Angeles and Denver. It operates the Sabey Data Center, which includes a finished 120,000 square foot data center and 350,000 of expansion space. Sabey initially built the facility for Exodus, but bought it through the bankruptcy court after Exodus filed Chapter 11.