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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly. San Francisco-based data center developer and provider Digital Realty Trust has entered a joint-venture partnership with Behringer Harvard, a Dallas-based real-estate firm, to build a turn-key data center for multiple tenants at the Santa Clara Tech Center, a three-building campus in California's Silicon Valley.
As part of the agreement DRT bought a 50-percent equity interest in the Tech Center, previously wholly owned by Behringer Harvard. Samuel Gillespie, COO of DRT's new partner, said the deal served to advance Behringer Harvard's strategy to increase the Tech Center's value. "We are pleased to partner with DRT, a strong national leader in technology-related real estate," he said in a statement.
DRT's SVP of Acquisitions Scott Peterson said the deal was the next step in the company's push to ramp up inventory in Silicon Valley, a key high-demand market for data center space.
The Tech Center's three buildings offer about 460,000 sq ft combined. Two of them are leased to Hitachi Data Systems, which uses them as corporate headquarters, office space and research-and-development facilities. The third building is a single-story 150,000-sq-ft shell, which the partners plan to turn into a data center.
DRT will develop, lease and manage the future facility, while Behringer Harvard will continue operating the two office buildings. The shell building can support six data center POD's, totaling about 80,000 sq ft of raised floor. Construction of the first two POD's and base-building improvements has already begun. The partners expect to complete the first two POD's by the first quarter of 2011.
DRT and Behringer Harvard will split investment into redevelopment down the middle, with Behringer Harvard using proceeds from the equity sale to fund its portion of the first-phase build-out.