Sabey to Build Data Center

June 27, 2011
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Sabey Data Center Properties will enter one of the leading data center markets in the country, Northern Virginia, with the development of Intergate.Ashburn, a 490,000-square-foot campus in Ashburn, Va. The data center developer and operator has purchased 38 acres of land for the project in the Dulles Technology Corridor, approximately 30 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.

Intergate.Ashburn will sit within close proximity of Dulles International Airport at the core of the booming Northern Virginia data center market, which is the second largest data center market on the East Coast; metropolitan New York tops the list. The 70 megawatt, secure campus will consist of three buildings, the first of which, Building C, will encompass 140,000 square feet. Building B and Building A will feature 160,000 and 190,000 square feet, respectively. Designed by Sabey Architecture & Callison Architecture the facilities are already being marketed for lease to single- and multi-tenant users.

If the chronicle of Sabey’s most recently completed purpose-built data center, the 498,000-square-foot Intergate.Columbia in Wenatchee, Wash., is any indication, then the lease-up of Intergate.Ashburn should not present much of a problem. The Columbia facility opened its doors in late 2008, with the majority of its space having been claimed in advance. Today, the property is 100 percent leased to a tenant roster of investment grade businesses, including T-Mobile.

Intergate.Ashburn is just one of three new properties Sabey has in the works. In Quincy, Wash., the company broke ground in April on Intergate.Quincy, a 525,000-square-foot project. And in New York, Sabey shelled out $120 million on the acquisition of the principal condominium interest in the property at 375 Pearl St., where the 1 million-square-foot Intergate.Manhattan will debut in 2012.

Sabey is in expansion mode, and for good reason. The data center sector continues to grow stronger and stronger with no end in sight.

“If you do the underlying direct research on technology companies that benefit from web traffic, they conclude that by 2015, the amount of web traffic will have increased exponentially, and when web traffic increases the infrastructure that supports the web needs to increase and that means switches, gears and data centers,” Richard E. Scott, leader of commercial real estate services firm Grubb & Ellis’ technology practice group and member of the firm’s data center practice group, told CPE. “Every couple of years the amount of servers in the U.S. and across the world increases at a ridiculous rate when you get more people online. That is why data centers continue to do so well in a down market and in a recovering market.”

At Intergate.Ashburn, Sabey Construction Inc., a division of Sabey Data Center Properties, is on schedule to kick off construction of Building C this summer.