Flexential Eyes New Denver Data Center
The facility will be the company's largest in the metro to date.
Flexential is gearing up to build a new 249,000-square-foot, 22.5-megawatt data center complex in Parker, Colo., roughly 20 miles outside of Denver. The planned colocation facility will be the firm’s fifth and largest project in the Denver area, bringing its portfolio in the metro to 759,000 square feet and 49.4 megawatts.
Leasing at Flexential’s latest project will begin in the second half of this year, while the facility is expected to break ground in the second quarter of 2025. With an expected opening in 2026, the data center will be the latest addition to the firm’s FlexAnywhere platform, which allows customers to access portfolio-wide interconnections with cloud providers, alongside data protection and in-house professional services.
READ ALSO: AI Is Changing the Game for Data Centers
The new 17-acre Parker facility will be geared primarily towards businesses in the manufacturing, healthcare and financial services sectors. The data center will benefit from the area’s rich natural resources and a lower risk of natural disasters in comparison to some Eastern and Southern markets.
As part of a recent collaboration with Applied Digital, servers in the facility will be equipped with Nvidia H100 Tensor Core graphics processors, which are designed for exascale computing. Additionally, they can more quickly train large language models for artificial intelligence platforms.
Flexing muscles
A yearly update from Commercial Property Executive found that power availability and reliability are among the top considerations for data center developers amid the ongoing AI boom, pushing many new projects into secondary markets and rural areas.
A similar mindset has motivated the locations of some of the Flexential’s recent expansions. In July, the firm broke ground on two new developments in Atlanta and Portland, Ore., also part of the FlexAnywhere platform. The facilities have a total output of 110 megawatts.
Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley currently dominate the power consumption competition, respectively outputting 2,552 and 615 megawatts.
Data centers dominate investment portfolios
DLA Piper’s latest State of the Market Survey found that data centers have become the most attractive assets for commercial real estate investors, with 53 percent of survey identifying them as their top prospect.
Last week, Wisconsin’s data center market received a boost as Microsoft announced an investment package of more than $3 billion that will see the expansion of the company’s current campus project in Mount Pleasant. The project will also include educational collaborations with Gateway Technical College, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United Way Wisconsin and Racine, as well as the Racine Unified School District.
You must be logged in to post a comment.