QTS Adding 1.5M SF To Virginia Data Center Campus Amid Expansion Push
QTS Realty Trust is adding 1.5M SF to its data center campus near Richmond, Virginia, the latest in a wave of new projects and land acquisitions as the data center giant hits the gas on expansion.
Construction has already started on QTS' expansion in Henrico County, Virginia, a project that will add 240 megawatts and over 200 acres to the company’s existing campus in Richmond’s northern suburbs.
Sitting on land purchased from the Henrico County Economic Development Authority in March for around $18M, the project includes four new 167K SF data center buildings, each with two floors of server space, Data Center Dynamics reported Monday.
It’s the latest in a string of developments and land deals in what has been a busy July for QTS — the company has also been linked to a new campus in Denver and land deals in Phoenix and the Netherlands. The deals come just over one year after QTS was acquired by Blackstone in a $10B deal to take the previously publicly traded REIT private.
"[W]e will continue to seek new opportunities for investment as evidenced by the recent addition of 200+ acres to the Richmond campus," QTS Chief Revenue Officer Clint Heiden said in a press release. "We recognize that the digital business world is thriving, the data center industry is growing at [an] exponential pace to accommodate that change, and we have all the tools to usher in a new era of global communications."
QTS’ expansion in Henrico County, being built by DPR Construction and HITT Contracting, adds to an existing 1.4M SF campus the company calls its Richmond Mega Data Center. According to Richmond BizSense, the development centers around the company’s Richmond connectivity hub, where a number of major international fiber cables connect. The site also sits next to a Meta data center complex that is undergoing a major expansion. The $2B facility for Facebook’s parent company, totaling more than 2M SF of server space, is expected to be completed next year, according to Richmond BizSense.
For QTS, the Henrico expansion is one of a number of significant projects and transactions the company has undertaken in recent weeks. As previously reported in Bisnow, the colocation giant recently spent $250M to acquire 400 acres outside Phoenix. The land was previously slated to become a TK B logistics center, to be co-developed by First Industrial Realty Trust and Phoenix-based Merit Partners.
Last week, the Foundations digital infrastructure newsletter reported that QTS will also be expanding in Denver. Although QTS has not officially commented on its Denver plans, the company’s website now lists its “Denver Data Center Campus,” which it says will entail 177 megawatts of capacity over 67 acres in Aurora, Colorado.
Internationally, QTS announced earlier this month that it acquired land for an expansion of its facilities in the Netherlands. The company reportedly paid $9M for land near its two existing Dutch facilities in the province of Groningen.
