American Tower has broken ground on a new data center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Announced this week, the groundbreaking occurred at the site of the new 'American Tower Edge Data Center' in Raleigh, also known as RAI1.

“The Raleigh facility is part of a class of data centers, referred to as aggregation Edge data centers, which are intended to extend cloud services closer to the Edge,” the company said.

The 4,000 sq ft (371 sqm) facility will initially offer 1MW and is expected to go live in Q1 2025. The company said the site has the potential to offer 4MW across 16,000 sq ft (1,485 sqm) at full build-out. The site will leverage direct expansion cooling and assisted hot aisle containment to offer an average of 15kW per rack.

A company brochure says RAI1 will serve as the “middle mile” between cloud data centers and the Edge, and as a colocation and interconnection hub in Raleigh.

Primarily a tower firm, American Tower has a portfolio of around 226,000 wireless and broadcast towers, rooftops, and in-building systems globally.

CoreSite was acquired by American Tower in 2021, with the latter rolling several existing data centers into the acquired company. CoreSite has more than 27 data centers in operation or development across 11 US markets.

Separately, American Tower has been planning to deploy Edge data centers around tower sites. The company noted in its 2022 earnings calls that it had identified up to 1,000 potential locations for 1MW Edge sites. The company filed to develop an Edge data center in San Antonio, Texas, in July 2023. The company has partnered with IBM for its Edge ambitions.

American Tower also operates a number of small Edge colocation sites (seemingly branded as Access Edge data centers) previously launched at tower locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Denver and Boulder, Colorado. These have generally been smaller than the newly announced Raleigh facility; the Pittsburgh site totaled 360 sq ft (33 sqm).