AOL, once America’s favourite public Internet service provider, is selling 65 acres of its 100 acre Sterling campus in Loudoun County, Virginia to colocation provider Sentinel Data Centers for $25.2m.
Sentinel Data Centers currently offers colo services from two facilities in Memphis and New York, with 170,000 sq ft of white space in its name. The company, which sold two of its data centers to CyrusOne in February, has plans to build three data centers on the newly acquired Loudoun site, totalling at 2.8m sq ft (260,000 sq m).
Out with the old
Following its purchase by Verizon for $4.4bn in 2015, AOL has been selling off parts of the campus.
When it set up base in Loudoun County in 1996, America Online became one of the biggest employers in the area, but the company then saw massive revenue losses following its merger with Time Warner and its acquisition of doomed social network site Bebo.
Despite this, AOL remained a strong market player in digital advertising, and now operates as a subsidiary of Verizon as part of the company’s new media division, ‘Oath’. It owns several major media outlets including The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.