Digital Realty Trust buys 126 acres in Loudoun County for $43 million

Digital Realty Trust Inc., a San Francisco-based company with a data center  in Northern Virginia, said Monday that it has closed on the purchase of nearly 126 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County for $43 million for a second data center.

The site is located less than a mile from Digital Realty's existing data center campus in Ashburn and will allow Digital Realty to expand. Its adjacent to one of the main fiber trunk runs in the county as well as a recently constructed substation and Dominion Virginia Power transmission lines. The parcel is expected to support the development of more than 2 million square feet and the build-out of roughly 150 megawatts.

The company said construction work is expected to begin next year, subject to market demand. Delivery will be phased to facilitate customer expansion requirements upon completion of the existing Digital Ashburn data center campus.

“This acquisition is consistent with our strategy of investing in our global campus network to support the deployment of hybrid cloud environments near Internet hubs, providing capacity to grow with our best clients, and implementing our latest facility designs to support growing demand in Northern Virginia,” Digital Realty's CEO A. William Stein said in a statement. “Data center demand in Ashburn remains robust, and we expect that trend to continue … We are pleased to expand our footprint and to strengthen our position in Northern Virginia, which has proven to be one of the most desirable data center markets in the United States.”

JLL said in a report last month that Northern Virginia now ranks as the No. 1. data center market in the country.

Digital Realty Trust supports the data center and colocation strategies of more than 1,000 firms across its portfolio of data centers located throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.  Clients include domestic and international companies of all sizes, ranging from financial services, cloud and information technology services, to manufacturing, energy, gaming, life sciences and consumer products.