DataBank to add leased data center to Ashburn campus

DataBank, a Texas provider of data center, cloud, and interconnection services, has signed a lease on a data center currently under construction on Red Rum Drive in Ashburn by GI Partners, the California investment firm announced Thursday. 

Two other data center buildings are already located on Red Rum Drive. One is owned by DataBank and the other other is owned by GI Partners, which invests in private equity, real estate and data infrastructure, and leased by DataBank, according to a spokesperson for DataBank. 

During construction of the new building, GI Partners will add an additional 29 megawatts of power to the site, according to an announcement.

“GI has a proven track record in strategically adding value to existing and newly acquired data center assets and this project adds to that long list,” Tony Lin, the firm’s managing director, stated in the release.

Construction should be completed by the second quarter of 2025, according to GI Partners. The data center is expected to be ready by the first quarter in 2026, according to a news release distributed by DataBank on Thursday.  

A spokesperson for DataBank did not comment on financial terms of the deal.

All three data center properties will be combined into a new data center campus encompassing 18 acres and 375,000 square feet of data center space, according to DataBank.

“This new site demonstrates DataBank’s ability to creatively source additional space and power in extremely constrained markets,” Raul K. Martynek, DataBank’s CEO, stated in the release. “By expanding this Ashburn campus, DataBank is responding to the Northern [Virginia] market’s surging need for colocation space and power that can support the [AI] applications of the future.”

In 2023, DataBank bought 85 acres in Culpeper, where the company plans to build three two-story facilities totaling 1.4 million square feet of data center space with 192 megawatts of power, the company stated. That campus is less than 50 miles away from the Ashburn campus, according to DataBank. 

GI Partners data infrastructure team primarily invests in “hard asset infrastructure businesses underpinning the digital economy,” according to the firm’s news release. It owns six data center buildings in Northern Virginia.