Digital Realty Trust, Inc., a leading owner and manager of corporate data centres and Internet gateways, announced the acquisition of two properties in Europe. The first property, Cressex 1, is located in suburban London and totals approximately 51,000 rentable square feet of redevelopment space. The purchase price was £6.5 million. The company plans to build 20,000 square feet of raised floor, Turn-Key Datacentre(TM) space offering 2.88MW of IT load, as well as 15,000 square feet of supporting office/business continuity space. Construction is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of 2008 with completion expected by September 2008.
The second property, Naritaweg 52, is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was purpose built as a data center in 2001 and totals over 63,000 rentable square feet. The purchase price was Ôé¼18.9 million. The building is 100% leased through September 2011 to a leading international information technology services company and consists of over 24,000 square feet of raised floor technical space and nearly 21,000 square feet of office and other space.
"The addition of these two properties to our portfolio represents our continued expansion into select European markets, and is consistent with our strategy of acquiring high quality income producing assets along with value-add properties suitable for redevelopment," commented Michael F. Foust, chief executive officer of Digital Realty Trust.
"We are continuing to see strong demand from customers seeking Turn-Key Datacentre(TM) space in the London market, where supply remains very limited," added Chris Crosby, senior vice president of Digital Realty Trust.
"Redeveloping Cressex 1 gives us an opportunity to bring two 10,000 square foot PODs of Turn-Key Datacentre(TM) space to the supply-constrained London market much more quickly than if we were to develop a facility from the ground up - meeting the current demand while avoiding much of the risk associated with greenfield developments. Building out the space utilizing our POD Architecture(TM) will bring several unique elements to the UK market. The POD Architecture(TM) employs system plus system architecture providing a full 2N power train, as opposed to the shared electrical buss N+1 infrastructure typically utilized by other providers. Additionally, with our expertise in developing to green standards, including BREEAM in Europe and LEEDS in the US, we plan to deliver these as sustainable data centers."