Compass Datacenters, newcomer on the US wholesale market with roots growing out of Digital Realty Trust, has bought land in two US states for the first two sites of its modular data center campuses.

The developer has enough land to build multiple pods to its Truly Modular design in each of the two locations: Durham, North Carolina, and Franklin, Tennessee.

Chris Curtis, a Compass co-founder and SVP of acquisition and development with the company, said the Franklin site can accomodate a total of five Compass modules, and the Durham site has enough space for three.

Both locations fall well into a cornerstone of the Compass model: build data centers in underserved (or second-tier) US markets.

Both Durham and Franklin have lots of corporate headquarters buildings by some of the world’s biggest companies, and those customers have few to no choices of wholesale data center providers in those cities, Curtis said. “Both those markets were definitely at the very top of [Compass’] list.”

The Durham site is in the Research Triangle Park, a major high-tech R&D hub, while Franklin is near Nashville, which has a heavy presence of finance, insurance, healthcare, music and entertainment, publishing, transportation, biotech and other industries.

Compass closed acquisition of the Durham property earlier this month. It closed Franklin last week, Curtis said.

Compass is ready to demolish an existing building at the Durham site and erect in its place the first of three 21,000 sq ft data center pods, with 10,000 sq ft of raised floor powered by 1.2MW. The Franklin site is green-field.

Compass does not do custom-design or custom-size data centers, which is another key part of its business model. Standardized design and pre-fabrication of the modules enables the company to reduce time and cost required to bring data center capacity online.

Read more on CompassPod design in an earlier FOCUS story.

Earlier this month, Compass announced it had raised an additional US$45m in debt from Ohio's KeyBank to finance its near-term growth plans.

The company’s second co-founder is Chris Crosby, member of the team that started Digital, the world’s largest wholesale data center provider. He has told us he does not want to compete with his legacy, going instead into markets Digital would not necessarily go into.

Because the wholesale big boys prefer to build or buy in more established data center markets, such as the Silicon Valley, New York metro or Chicago, for example, there are plenty of regions that are underserved, and where demand for new data center space is high.

Read our feature about the birth of Compass and the people behind it on our website.