The Phoenix market has a new big data center online, i/o Data Centers has officially opened the doors of Phoneix ONE. The new facility is, to put it mildly, huge: 538,000 square feet on 31 acres of propery, and is more than four times the size of its other facility – Scottsdale ONE.
i/o has pushed this facility to market with some very impressive seed. The seed money came just a week before Christmas via a $56M investment by Sterling Partners. Just a week after New Year’s, they had the property in hand. By April, they had fiber into the site and were installing raised flooring. In May SGI had already delivered an ICE Cube. And now in June, the doors are already open. That doesn’t mean all 538,000 square feet are ready to go, I’m sure they’re still installing raised floor etc in parts of it.
But from their speed it is clear to me that i/o senses an opportunity here. With so much other data center construction suspended, delayed, or just slowed due to the credit crunch, new facilities with large amounts of available space are in scarce supply. To be able to build and sell new colocation space into todays unquenchable demand and constricted supply offers i/o the chance to grow its business by orders of magnitude in a short period of time. That window may only be open for a few quarters, and hence their speed. Timing is everything.
With this project well in hand, I wonder what their next move will be. Can they raise more cash now that the markets aren’t so tight? And if they do, will they stay focused on the Phoenix market or might they expand geographically? Hmmmm…
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Hi Rob,
We had a couple of stories last week on the innovations at Phoenix ONE, which go beyond its size. See Solar Power at Data Center Scale and Ready to Supersize the Enterprise>/a> for additional details.
I received a tour from i/o about 2 months ago, as the raised floor for phase 1 was being installed.
You are correct, they are planning on building out in phases, but they are huge footprints. It won’t take much to complete the other phases as much of infrastructure is already in place.
Very impressive facility and i/o is poised to win a lot of business from California and elsewhere….