DuPont Fabros needs to raise $145 million to build out Phase 2 of this data center in Ashburn, Va.

Wholesale data center provider DuPont Fabros is going to focus its attention and resources on completing two new developments in New Jersey and Virginia before it picks up its Silicon Valley project, which has been on hold since fall of last year.

"It's very clearly going to be the third project we do, but we want to grow carefully and with the right kind of money," DuPont Fabros President and CEO Hossein Fateh said about the Santa Clara, Calif., data center in a conference call on Wednesday. "Meanwhile, if we have a big pre-lease coming, we'll divert our attention."

This week the company reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2009.

DuPont Fabros executed five new leases during the quarter, totaling 15.9 MW of power and yielding about $310 million in total contract value from the entire respective lease terms. Two of the leases went to a new enterprise customer and the rest went to existing Internet-business customers.

At the very beginning of the current quarter, the company executed one more lease of a 1.95-MW facility in Reston, Va.

To date, Microsoft and Yahoo! remain DuPont Fabros's biggest customers, occupying more than half of all of the company's data center space.

Third-quarter revenues were about $52 million - an increase from the same quarter last year, when DuPont Fabros reported revenues of about $43 million. The company's net income in the third quarter of this year was about $3.4 million - down from about $4.1 million in the third quarter of 2008.

During the last quarter the company opened Phase 1 of ACC5, its newest development in Ashburn, Va., increasing its critical-load portfolio by 18 percent. The space is currently 73-percent leased.

The company's near-term goal is to raise enough capital to build out Phase 2 of the Ashburn facility and Phase 1 of its property in Piscataway, N. J. "We're committed to each development, however we plan to manage this growth carefully," Fateh said. "We cannot and will not restart development without new funds."

DuPont Fabros needs to raise about $145 million for ACC5 Phase 2 (already 38-percent pre-leased) and about $75 million for NJ1 Phase 1. While pointing to a "challenging" lending environment, Fateh said he was confident that both projects would be completed by the end of 2010.

The company will focus its sales resources on further leasing out its Ashburn facility, as well as the data center in Chicago, opened in August of last year. The Chicago facility is 48 percent leased.

Fateh said he considered the four aforementioned locations (Virginia, New Jersey, Chicago and Silicon Valley) to be key strategic markets for the company.

Overall, DuPont Fabros CEO was confident about the company's position in the wholesale data center market, currently occupied by only one more big player: San Francisco, Calif.-based Digital Realty Trust.

"In all the markets that we're at, we're very dominant and we like our competitive landscape," he said. "At the moment (there are) two big competitors that are public in the wholesale space and there's room for five or six, so we're not really worried about it."