T5 Raises $70M to Fund Charlotte Data Center Construction

T5 Data Centers, an Atlanta-based data center provider that specializes in offering wholesale data center space, has closed a new $68.5 million credit facility to finance new data center construction at its Kings Mountain, North Carolina, campus just outside of Charlotte.

Joe Junda, a managing director at CIT Communications and Technology Finance, which arranged the credit, said Charlotte was a strong data center market. “The combination of favorable tax incentives, low power costs, dependable access to power, abundant fiber connectivity, and a strong base of corporate headquarters position Charlotte as a viable location in the data center market,” he said in a statement.

The latest 130,000-square-foot project is CIT’s second investment in a data center construction project by T5. The financial holding company financed T5’s Portland build last year.

T5, which also has data centers in Atlanta, Colorado, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York markets, partnered with private equity firm Iron Point Partners on the new Charlotte build.

While providing wholesale data center capacity is its bread and butter, in recent years, T5 has been expanding the variety of services it offers to its tenants. Other wholesale providers, such as the giant Digital Realty Trust, have been making similar moves, recognizing that enterprise customers increasingly want more from their data center providers.

In late 2014, T5 partnered with Carpathia Hosting, which has since been acquired by QTS Realty Trust, a major T5 competitor, to offer custom infrastructure solutions, such as managed hosting, cloud, and colocation. It’s unclear how the acquisition affected the partnership, but in September 2015, T5 rolled out colocation services of its own and direct network connections to cloud service providers at its Atlanta and Los Angeles data centers.