The new facility, named IAD4 will add 20MW of IT load and 70,000 square feet of data centre space to the campus and is being developed in collaboration with GI Partners, a private alternatives investment firm.
It will join the two existing facilities (IAD1, and IAD3) already in operation on the 13-acre campus.
IAD4 will be leased to DataBank by GI Partners, with an explicit option to buy (which DataBank intends to execute), meaning it will eventually join IAD3 as fully owned by DataBank.
Its addition will increase the total capacity of the campus to 18 acres, 70MW of power and 375,000 square feet of data centre space
DataBank are initially leasing a powered shell from GI Partners for IAD4, but will build out all the internal mechanical, electrical and plumbing components of the data centre.
The building shell will be ready for DataBank to move in Q2 2025 and the company will be customer-ready in Q1 2026.
It will use DataBank’s new Universal Data Hall Design, which promises to ensure capacity can be quickly deployed and meet the sustainability and High-Performance Computing (HPC) power and cooling requirements of the most demanding hyperscale cloud and AI applications.
“This new site demonstrates DataBank’s ability to creatively source additional space and power in extremely constrained markets,” said Raul Martynek, DataBank’s CEO.
“By expanding this Ashburn campus, DataBank is responding to the northern VA market’s surging need for colocation space and power that can support the A.I. applications of the future.”
GI Partners has longstanding familiarity with the Northern Virginia data centre market, owning six data centre assets in Northern Virginia totalling over one million square feet.
“Ashburn and Loudoun County as a whole is the largest and most active data center hub in the world and this project represents another example of GI’s extensive value creation capabilities in data centres,” said Tony Lin, managing director of GI partners.
“GI has a proven track record in strategically adding value to existing and newly acquired data centre assets and this project adds to that long list.”
Late last year, DataBank bought 85 acres of land in Culpeper, Virginia, creating a second campus in the Northern Virginia market.
That campus will eventually accommodate three two-story facilities totalling 1.4 million square feet of data centre space and 192MW of power.
GI partners has raised more than $40 billion and invests on behalf of leading institutional investors around the world through its private equity, real estate, and data infrastructure strategies.
Its real estate team focuses primarily on technology and life sciences properties as well as other specialised types of real estate.
The data infrastructure team invests primarily in hard asset infrastructure businesses underpinning the digital economy.
