Second tenant at Power Loft @ Innovation revealed
Jason Schafer
On Thursday, March 11, Power Loft had its official ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Manassas, Virginia facility. While we don't normally cover these types of events, as part of the program, the second tenant of the facility was disclosed as Horizon Data Center Solutions – a provider of colocation, managed services and recently cloud services. Tier1 believes the long term plan for Horizon is for approximately 10 critical MW at the Power Loft facility, but the first phase will be for two of Power Loft's 'bays,' or roughly 4 critical MW.
Tier1 knew that Horizon was looking at the northern Virginia market, likely talking to Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros. Horizon is a decent-sized customer for Digital, and started its business in the Dallas area by leveraging Digital Realty's wholesale product. That Horizon ended up choosing Power Loft for its main northern Virginia location came as a little bit of a surprise to us since they have such a history with Digital, but it's also somewhat of a testament to the quality and offerings of Power Loft's facility. Tier1 sees business continuing quite significantly in northern Virginia, and industry sources share that there are several pending deals underway for the remaining space at Power Loft. While certainly not a guarantee, we believe this is likely to mean that the next 50,000 net square feet (or 15 critical MW) may not be far off, though Power Loft's expansion plans are still unknown. We expected that Power Loft, after landing its first tenant, CapGemini, would fill its remaining datacenter space relatively quickly, and all signs seem to indicate this is turning out to be the case.
Tier1 also believes that the efficiency aspect of Power Loft's facility played somewhat of a role in the final selection for Horizon (there are even parking spots at the facility set aside for clean fuel vehicles). Horizon's presence, along with the fact that Power Loft received the Northern Virginia Technology Council's Green Award, means that smaller colocation customers will be able to hop aboard the 'green' train. Design and engineering expectations are one thing, but operational history is another. Tier1 is eager to see the facility ramp up its power utilization to quantify its unconventional design elements, and we think Power Loft (and its tenants) would benefit from public transparency of actual operational metrics such as PUE.