Aligned Energy Building New Data Center After Securing $495M

‘Aligned continues to set — and achieve — aggressive speed-to-market targets, most recently in Ashburn, and now in Salt Lake County with our latest greenfield deployment,’ says Aligned Energy CEO Andrew Schaap.

After securing nearly $500 million from investors to support data center expansion and speed-to-market, Aligned Energy broke ground on Wednesday on a new facility in Utah with plans to build a massive campus in the region.

The Plano, Texas-based data center and cooling specialist is building a new 240,000-square-foot facility with 48-megawatt capacity in West Jordan, Utah. The new facility, expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2020, will be adjacent to another existing Aligned Energy data center, with the goal of building a large campus that will offer a total of 780,000 square-feet and 130 megawatts of capacity.

“Aligned continues to set — and achieve — aggressive speed-to-market targets, most recently in Ashburn, and now in Salt Lake County with our latest greenfield deployment,” said Aligned Energy CEO Andrew Schaap in a statement. “Our second West Jordan facility will provide adaptable, efficient and sustainable data center infrastructure to enable enhanced availability, performance and scale for customers’ growing cloud and application workloads in the region.”

[Related: Digital Realty To Buy Interxion To Become Data Center Colocation King]

The expansion in Utah was driven by the addition of a new anchor customer, who Aligned did not identify. The campus will feature the company’s Delta Cube cooling technology which allows customers to scale up to 50 kilowatts per rack without having to reconfigure existing infrastructure or requiring large capex investments.

This month, Aligned Energy completed a $495 million secured credit facility with investors such as Goldman Sachs Bank and CPPIB Credit Investments.

The funding will provide the data center specialist with flexible, low-cost capital to support growth initiatives including expanding its portfolio and solutions at scale inside its current U.S. data centers located in Ashburn, Va.; Dallas; Phoenix; and Salt Lake City. Aligned Energy provides co-location, high-reliability connections and build-to-scale data center solutions, while specializing in capacity management needs and innovation such as cooling technology. The company said its intelligent infrastructure enables customers to scale up without disruption while maintaining top-notch Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).

Salt Lake City is becoming a highly desirable colocation market thanks in part to lucrative tax incentives and low-costing electricity rates. Last year, Utah Country approved $150 million in tax incentives to try to lure companies to build data centers in the region.

Tax incentives, such as exemptions from property taxes, have been fueling data center expansion in the U.S. over the past several years. For example, in Oregon last week, local authorities agreed to give Amazon a total exemption from property taxes for 15 years in order to allow the company to build a new data center campus in Hermiston, Oregon. Amazon is now preparing to start construction on its seventh data center in northeastern Oregon.

The largest cloud and co-location providers in the world have been investing billions every quarter this year in building new hyperscale data centers or expanding existing centers, led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In the second quarter of 2019 alone, operators spent $28 billion on building, expanding and equipping these huge data centers.