Investment firm I Squared Capital has launched a new data center company called Saragon.

The new platform will be backed by up to $1 billion in committed capital from I Squared and has been seeded with ten data centers across nine US markets, acquired from Cogent earlier this year.

The portfolio spans Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Baltimore, Houston, Nashville, and Stockton, with approximately 53MW of installed power capacity and 259,000 square feet (24,060 sqm) of colocation space.

Serving both retail and wholesale customers, the company said it aims to support high-density and liquid-cooled deployments as well as interconnection-rich environments for AI inference, content delivery, and hybrid-cloud workloads.

Saragon plans to “scale rapidly” through investment in its existing footprint, customer-led expansions, and additional acquisitions.

Steve Orlando has been appointed CEO of the new company. He joins from Seaborn Networks, where he spent nearly six years leading the operator of Seabras-1, the subsea cable system connecting Brazil and the United States. He has also had stints at Zayo, Level3, Verizon, MCI, and Global Crossing.

“Demand for Edge capacity is accelerating across everything we do — retail, enterprise, and wholesale colocation alike — as businesses of every kind bring compute closer to their users,” said Steve Orlando, CEO of Saragon. “AI inference is the newest driver, but the same fundamentals power content delivery, hybrid cloud, and mission-critical enterprise workloads. With a launch footprint spanning nine major markets across the country and the backing of I Squared Capital, Saragon is built to deliver that capacity where our customers need it most.”

Founded in 2012, US-based I Squared Capital has assets worth $60 billion under management and is an investor in other digital infrastructure companies, including European data center firm nLighten and APAC data center operator BDx, fiber firms Exa and Lightstorm, and thousands of cell tower sites. In 2021, I Squared acquired Mexican data center firm Kio. It acquired Brazilian operator Elea earlier this year.

The ten purpose-built facilities were originally developed in the 1980s and 1990s as switching sites to serve Sprint’s legacy US long-haul fiber network. After Sprint was sold to T-Mobile in 2020, the facilities and network were sold to Cogent for just $1 in 2022.

Cogent announced plans to develop around 100 of the switching sites into colocation facilities. That conversion project was completed earlier this year.

Originally set to offer colocation, the company later pivoted and planned to sell or lease the largest 24 facilities on a wholesale basis – keeping back a small portion of each facility for its own network needs.

As of its most recent earnings results, Cogent had 185 Cogent data centers and Edge data centers totaling 2.1+ million sq ft (195,096 sqm), 40,954 racks, and 211MW. The portfolio includes 99 data centers and 86 Edge facilities.

DCD has previously spoken with Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer to discuss the company’s repurposing of legacy Sprint switch sites. Read it here.