STACK to Build 1.8M SF Data Hub in Downtown Phoenix
Campus with five buildings powered by renewables, 230 MW of capacity.
STACK Infrastructure has announced that it will build a 230 MW-capacity data center mega-campus on a 50-acre site in Downtown Phoenix.
The developer is planning five hyperscale data center buildings encompassing 1.78M SF of data processing space at the campus, which will be known as PHXL2. Each of the server farms will range in capacity from 30 and 60 MW, and the site will have a dedicated onsite substation
STACK previously announced plans for a 150 MW data center campus in Goodyear, 20 miles west of Phoenix.
The new STACK Phoenix campus will be located near a large hub of long-haul fiber and metro network providers and will offer connectivity options to cloud player who have made Phoenix the most rapidly growing data center hub in the US.
The new campus will run on 100% renewable energy, a standard feature of new data centers built by STACK Americas. The company uses a design that reduces the use of water in its cooling system, a critical requirement in Phoenix, which is experiencing a drought that may force the metro to reduce its use of the water supply from the Colorado Basin.
STACK’s new project is the second major data center expansion to be announced for Downtown Phoenix in recent days. Earlier this month, Iron Mountain acquired a 10-acre property next to its existing two-building, 89 MW campus in Phoenix.
Iron Mountain is planning to build a 36 MW data center encompassing 230K MW on the 10-acre parcel. Iron Mountain also acquired Xdata Properties, including a campus in Madrid.
Phoenix is the hottest data center market in the US, measured in megawatts of net absorption, as overall US market absorption surges past the total demand in 2021, according to the latest Data Center Outlook report from JLL.
US market demand reached 1,087 MW in H1 2022, more than 95% of total demand in 2021. JLL attributed the surge to the adoption of hybrid work patterns and the ongoing explosion of streaming apps, as well as historically high pre-leasing activity.
“Hybrid work is here to stay, and there is no stopping the growth in personal usage of social media, online gaming and streaming applications,” JLL’s H1 2022 report said.
According to JLL, the exponential rise in demand for data processing facilities “continues to pose challenges for the availability of land and power, causing operators to look to new markets with more availability.”
The market that appears to be benefitting the most from these trends is Greater Phoenix, which topped the leaderboard in H1 2022 demand with 280 MW of absorption — more than 10 times the total absorption in the Phoenix market in 2021.
Northern Virginia’s absorption tally in H1 was 240 MW, followed by Seattle-Portland at 194 MW; Dallas-Fort Worth at 177 MW; Chicago at 99 MW; and Atlanta at 97 MW.