News Story

American Real Estate Acquires Site in Ashburn’s Data Center Alley

Harrison Street and AREP acquire real estate in Ashburn for data center.

Data Center Frontier

By Rich Miller

American Real Estate Partners (AREP) has teamed with investor Harrison Street to acquire a piece of prime real estate in “Data Center Alley” in Ashburn, Virginia where it plans to build a 265,000 square foot data center. The project is part of a major building boom to add cloud computing capacity in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.

AREP paid $21.5 million to acquire a 10.3-acre property at the intersection of Beaumeade Circle and Loudoun County Parkway, one of the most strategic locations in the Ashburn market. The site at 21445 Beaumeade is next door to data centers for Equinix and RagingWire, and immediately adjacent to major new campuses for Equinix and Amazon Web Services. It also lies in close proximity to the original Equinix Ashburn campus, which is the center of connectivity in America’s most wired neighborhood.

AREP, which also owns the Quantum Park campus in Ashburn, plans to build a two-story, 265,000 square foot “powered shell” data center, with a finished structure and utility connections in place and the ability for a tenant to customize the infrastructure. Construction is scheduled to begin later this year and can be delivered on a fast-track basis, the company said.

“Demand for data centers far outstrips current capacity and recent construction is nearly 100 percent absorbed,” said AREP CEO Doug Fleit, who said the site “has all of the elements data center users are seeking with its extraordinary location and access to power and fiber. 21455 Beaumeade Circle’s ‘main and main’ location will enable AREP to meet this critical demand and furthers our investment strategy to develop assets that expand data availability and connectivity.”