TA Realty Lands 1.9 MSF Tenant for Data Center Campus

James Raisides, managing partner at TA Realty, leads the firm’s portfolio management team. Image courtesy of TA Realty

TA Realty has leased its entire 1.9 million-square-foot, five-building data center campus in Loudoun County, Va., to a global cloud services provider. Construction on the 430 MW build-to-suit complex in Leesburg is slated to start by the end of this year and completion is expected in 2027.

Situated on the east side of Sycolin Road, the 95-acre development site is bound by Cochran Mill Road to the north and Energy Park Drive to the south, strategically positioned atop major fiber routes and alongside transmission lines. The location is suitable for data center construction also due to an adjacent power plant, logistics facility and existing power substation.

This build-to-suit lease marks the formation of a new group at TA Realty dedicated to digital infrastructure, which will be formally unveiled in early 2024.

READ ALSO: Data Center Leasing Picks Up

Once complete, the TA Realty campus will be among the largest and most modern in the area. The company first announced the project in May 2021. Back then, plans called for a 300 MW, 1.5 million-square-foot complex that would have cost $1.8 billion to develop. The first buildings were expected to come online in late 2021. TA Realty had paid $60 million for the development site in March 2021, according to Loudoun County records.

Buddy Rizer, executive director of Loudoun Economic Development, said in a prepared statement TA Realty is showing its commitment to Loudoun County by building a new water pump station on the site that will improve the quality and distribution of water in the region.

Northern Virginia’s data center growth

Loudoun County is home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. Overall, Northern Virginia has an estimated 18 million square feet of data center space in operation with more on the way. In January, Amazon Web Services announced it will commit $35 billion over the next 17 years to expand its data center operations in Virginia, essentially doubling its presence in the state.

Other Virginia projects include STACK Infrastructure’s 80-acre campus in Sterling, along with the $1 billion commitment by a joint venture of American Real Estate Partners and Harrison Street aiming to bring online 2.1 million square feet of data centers. As part of that commitment, Powerhouse Data Centers, an AREP subsidiary, in October began demolishing the former AOL headquarters in Sterling that will be developed into a three-building data center campus.