Vantage Completes 9MW Data Center on Silicon Valley Campus

First tenants have started fitting out their space in the newest Vantage data center in Silicon Valley. The company officially announced completion of the fifth building on its existing campus in Santa Clara, California, this week. (A second campus nearby is in the works.)

Vantage has been one of the few players in the supply-constrained Silicon Valley data center market that have managed to add new capacity in recent years. Demand for new data center space is high in the area, but the supply of land has been tight, making it difficult for data center providers to build more facilities.

At the year’s midpoint, vacancy rate across existing data center space in the Valley was 5.3 percent, according to the real estate brokerage CBRE. Silicon Valley and the Chicago market now have two of the lowest data center vacancy rates in the country.

Data center tenants who lease large amounts of capacity at a time – companies Vantage primarily caters to – have had few options in the Valley, either pre-leasing future space or waiting until providers complete projects. One of those tenants, Microsoft, recently bought a piece of land in San Jose, where it plans to build a data center on its own instead of leasing.

These market dynamics have put Vantage in a strong position to win business in Santa Clara because of the former Intel campus it secured when it launched as a company in 2010. It’s been developing the campus over time, adding one data center building after another; recently, it secured a large piece of land less than 2 miles away for a second campus.

The latest building on campus one, called V6, adds 9MW of power capacity across two stories of data center space, bringing the campus’s total load to 60MW. Construction of another, sixth building on the campus is already underway. The future four-story data center’s power capacity will be 15MW.

Acquired earlier this year by investor Digital Bridge, Vantage also has a campus in Quincy, Washington, and this month announced expansion in the largest and hottest data center market in the country: Northern Virginia. The company has secured land in Ashburn, where it plans to build a 108MW, $1 billion data center campus.