DC BLOX to Build 750 KSF Data Center Campus in Atlanta Suburb

A rendering of DC BLOX’s new campus in Conyers, Ga. Image courtesy of DC BLOX

DC BLOX has purchased 72 acres of land for the construction of a two-building, 216-megawatt hyperscale-ready data center campus in the Atlanta suburb of Conyers, Ga.

The 750,000-square-foot project, designed to meet the Uptime Institute’s Tier 3 certification, will be built in two phases, with the first expected to deliver in the fourth quarter of 2025. An unnamed hyperscale client has signed on as the anchor tenant for the initial phase, and an additional 160,000 square feet of space will be available for lease to additional tenants.

According to DC BLOX, the development has been granted incentives from the Development Authority of Rockdale County via the Conyers Rockdale Economic Development Council. The facilities have been designed by Thomas & Hutton and Corgan, while Evans General Contractors will be in charge of the construction process. Bennett & Pless and DLB Associates will oversee structural and mechanical engineering.

The campus’ tech specs

Upon completion, the property will include one 30-megawatt facility and another capable of accommodating 80-megawatts of power. In total, the campus will be able to support a critical load of up to 150-megawatts, with energy supplied by Georgia Power.

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When completed, the campus will be connected to new dark fiber ring being built around metro Atlanta. The ring itself will link up with a 500-mile dark fiber route that extends to a cable landing station in Myrtle Beach, S.C. That project, which connects the future site with hubs in downtown Atlanta, Augusta, Ga., as well as Charleston, S.C., broke ground in October of 2022, and is expected to come online later this year.

On the inside, the facilities will include 26,000-square-foot data halls, each equipped with 10-megawatt power blocks. The buildings’ base temperature control solutions will incorporate N+2-redundant air-cooled chillers with magnetic bearings, as well as N+5-redundant vertically set fan coils lining the data halls themselves. Additionally, the spaces will be able to accommodate liquid cooling.

Adding to a data center hub

The project, which lies 24 miles outside of Atlanta, is the firm’s second development in the area, following last month’s groundbreaking of a $1.2 billion, 180-megawatt facility located in Lithia Springs, Ga.

Both projects are taking shape at a time when the Atlanta data center market has experienced considerable upticks in investment, development and leasing, owing in part to energy delivery limitations in Northern Virginia, as well as to the need to accommodate local operations from the likes of Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft. According to an October 2023 market update from Cushman & Wakefield, the city has 670 megawatts of space under construction, with an absorption of 121 megawatts. Presently, the market has 480 megawatts of space in operation, and a vacancy rate of 2.9 percent, one of the lowest in the country.

Within a week of DC BLOX’s groundbreaking on its Lithia Springs facility, DataBank announced the addition of 120 megawatts to the city’s pipeline, acquiring 95 acres of land for the construction of a 1 million-square-foot facility expected to come online in 2026.