Data center developer and provider Ascent has revealed the name of the anchor tenant of the company's second Chicago-area data center. Comcast, one of the largest cable and entertainment companies, has taken a 27,000 sq ft dedicated suite at the campus in the City of Northlake, Data Center Knowledge reported.

Ascent said it had found an anchor tenant for the new facility in December 2010 but did not reveal the tenant's name, saying only that it was a Fortune 100 multimedia company that took the custom-built 4MW suite.

Ascent's first data center in suburban Chicago was leased to Microsoft, which filled it with data center containers.

A second tenant is moving into the second Ascent facility in the market to become Comcast's neighbor, but the provider has not yet revealed that tenant's name.

Comcast director of data center management Simpson Cumba told DCK that the company has the option to expand beyond the initial suite at the site if it needs to. "One of the things we really like about this data center is that the property offers us the ability to expand in contiguous space," he said.

Ascent CEO Phil Horstmann told DatacenterDynamics last year that the site's total power capacity at full build-out would reach 54MW.

The company bought the 20-acre property in Northlake around May 2010 after raising more than US$100m from investors. The company expected to spend about $75m in infrastructure equipment to support the anchor tenant.