NTT Buys 103-Acre Site for 2M SF Data Campus in Northern VA
Demand for data center hub drives up land prices, $257M deal doubles what Microsoft paid for 93 acres in July.
Infrastructure company NTT is expanding its data center portfolio with the $257.4M acquisition of 103 acres of land adjacent to the largest data center cluster in the US in Northern Virginia. The seller was Lerner Enterprises.
NTT is planning to build its largest single campus in North America in Gainesville, VA, with a total of 2M SF of server farm space in four large-scale buildings. When completed, the campus will generate 336MW of data-processing capacity, which the industry measures in net megawatts absorbed.
Skyrocketing demand for data centers as cloud services proliferate has significantly increased the value of available land in the Northern VA in the heart of the world’s leading data center hub.
NTT’s acquisition price of $257.4M for the 103-acre site of its campus in Gainesville is more than double what Microsoft paid last July to acquire about 93 acres in Bristol, VA.
NTT is aiming to have the first two-story building ready to open by the second quarter of 2024 on the campus, which will be located off John Marshall Highway.
“The purchase of land in Prince William County is part of a diversified strategy as we look to expand into new and important areas of growth,” said Masaaki Moribayashi, president of NTT, in a statement.
“The development of our new campus in Virginia will be one of 14 ongoing projects taking place across the globe,” Moribayashi said.
NTT is in the midst of a global expansion with a goal of increasing its installed data center capacity to more than 1,000MW in facilities in more than 20 countries by the end of 2022.
Moribayashi predicts that by 2025 at least 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud platforms, up from 30% in 2021. “The demand for data centers to support this shift has never been higher,” he said.
As Northern Virginia’s relentless data center expansion pushes into more rural areas, pushback has been emerging from residents who want to preserve the bucolic nature of their communities and preservationists who want to keep data centers away from places like the Civil War battlefield at Manassas.
In March, officials in Culpeper County refused to give Amazon Web Services the zoning variance it needed to build a pair of data centers totaling 420K SF on 243 acres in Stevensburg, VA. The site is currently occupied by a horse farm and equestrian center.