Harrison Street, a private equity firm, and American Real Estate Partners (AREP), a developer and operator of data centers, have committed $1bn to a joint venture to build powered shell data center campuses in Northern Virginia. To-date the joint venture has acquired two development sites in the Northern Virginia sub-market of Loudoun County, on which it will develop six buildings, spanning 2.1 million sqft.

Strategically, Harrison Street and AREP intend to deliver powered shells (i.e., space and power, but no interior fit-out) to cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Powered Shell Data Centers – Northern Virginia – Harrison Street and AREP

Harrison Street and AREP’s two new sites are located at 22070 Broderick Drive in Sterling, Virginia and on Arcola Boulevard in Sterling, Virginia.

Prior to forming today’s joint venture, in January 2021, Harrison Street and AREP acquired another development site at 21445 Beaumeade Circle in Ashburn, Virginia. As described below, both firms are in the process of demolishing the existing buildings at 21445 Beaumeade Circle to replace them with a newly constructed data center campus.

Overall, all three development sites (two new sites and 21445 Beaumeade Circle) will be completed within the next two to three years.

21445 Beaumeade Circle – Ashburn, Virginia – ABX-1

Harrison Street and AREP, via the entity AREP Beaumeade LLC, own a 10.3-acre site at 21445 Beaumeade Circle in Ashburn, Virginia. Specifically, this site is located east of Beaumeade Circle, north of Loudoun County Parkway, and west of the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, within Beaumeade Corporate Park.

21445 Beaumeade Circle Ashburn Virginia Map

Presently, a 79.0k sqft flex-industrial building, parking lot, and vacant land comprise the 10.3-acre property.

Development – AREP Beaumeade Data Center

Initially, Harrison Street and AREP plan to demolish the existing building and all related infrastructure and regrade the site to create a pad for a future data center building. Subsequently, utilizing a floor area ratio (FAR) of 0.6, the joint venture plans to construct a two-story, 265k sqft powered shell data center at the site.

Per Loudoun County, this application is known as the AREP Beaumeade Data Center. Additionally, Loudoun County application documents indicate a total estimated project investment of $200m, alongside the creation of 50 new jobs.

Property Transfer

In January 2021, AREP Beaumeade LLC purchased the 21445 Beaumeade Circle property for $21.5m from Chirisa Capital Management’s entity Chirisa BCVA LLC. Indeed, this price is equivalent to valuing the land at $2.1m per acre.

22070 Broderick Drive – Sterling, Virginia

The 22070 Broderick Drive site represents the former AOL headquarters, currently operated by Yahoo, and is located on Pacific Boulevard, adjacent to Ashburn. Upon completion, this campus will be comprised of 4 build-to-suit powered shell data centers for hyperscale tenants and will deliver 300 megawatts of electrical power capacity.

Arcola Campus – Sterling, Virginia

Harrison Street and AREP’s Arcola Campus is located on Arcola Boulevard, directly across the street from Google’s new development, and near Dulles International Airport. Specifically, the Arcola development will include two powered shell build-to-suit data centers with ~100 to 125 megawatts of capacity.

Harrison Street and AREP – Sources of Capital

Both joint venture partners, Harrison Street and AREP, will be funding their commitments through distinct third-party capital vehicles:

  • Harrison Street Real Estate Partners VIII: $2.5bn closed-end U.S. opportunistic real estate fund
  • Harrison Street Social Infrastructure Fund: $1.0bn+ open-end infrastructure fund. For this strategy, individual transactions will be around $150m or less
  • AREP Strategic Opportunity Fund III: regulatory filings show this fund has amassed at least $46m of equity as of October 2021

Harrison Street – Digital Infrastructure

Since 2018, Harrison Street has invested $2.4bn in digital infrastructure including powered shell data centers, carrier hotels, and dark fiber. Specifically, the firm’s investments include:

Mary Zhang covers Data Centers for Dgtl Infra, including Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), CyrusOne, CoreSite Realty, QTS Realty, Switch Inc, Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM), Cyxtera (NASDAQ: CYXT), and many more. Within Data Centers, Mary focuses on the sub-sectors of hyperscale, enterprise / colocation, cloud service providers, and edge computing. Mary has over 5 years of experience in research and writing for Data Centers.

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