Flexential Adds 110 MW With New Data Centers

Flexential’s campus in Douglasville, Ga. Photo courtesy of Flexential

Flexential has broken ground on new developments in Portland, Ore., and Atlanta. The company plans to expand its FlexAnywhere service platform, adding data centers totaling 110 megawatts in the two markets. The firm expects to bring a total of 40.5 megawatts online this year.

Flexential has two projects underway in the Atlanta metro, both at the company’s Douglasville, Ga., campus. Douglasville-1, which broke ground in the fourth quarter of last year and will add 22.5 megawatts across 205,000 square feet of raised floor space, will come online later this year.

Earlier this year, the company started work on Douglasville-2, which will be constructed in several phases and add 36 megawatts across 240,000 square feet of raised floor space.

Atlanta has long been the gateway for all network traffic traversing the Southeast, making data centers a strong sector within the metro. “As an economic- and business-friendly metro, it has a large talent pool and high density of universities, attracting businesses of all sizes,” Flexential Senior Vice President of Platform Product Management Sherri Harrell told Commercial Property Executive.

“Geographically, the metro remains a strong location for mission-critical enterprise workloads in the Southeast that desire less volatile weather, as opposed to Florida, for example, which is prone to weather disruptions,” said Harrell. Atlanta is also an alternative to North Virginia, which also has some power constraints.

Flexential is also building two data centers in the Portland metro, both in Hillsboro, Ore. The company broke ground on Hillsboro-4 last year, announcing plans to construct its fifth facility on its campus there—together, Hillsboro-4 and a newer facility, Hillsboro-5, will bring a total of 54 megawatts online.

The 18-megawatt Hillsboro-4 data center is nearing completion and will be available for clients in the fall of this year. Shell construction started on Hillsboro-5 early this year. That project will deliver an additional 36 megawatts across 240,000 square feet of raised floor space.

Both data centers are on Flexential’s campus in Hillsboro and will leverage the market’s rich network connectivity. “Strong demand in the market has been driven by a combination of tax advantages for businesses, along with dense networking options,” Harrell told CPE. Hillsboro is the main Network Access Point of the Northwest, home to two subsea cable landing stations, further granting access to the Asia-Pacific region.

A new generation of data center design

All four new facilities will be constructed to Flexential’s latest standards of sustainable design. The data centers will operate at a power usage efficiency of 1.4 and will have zero water usage efficiency, requirements that need to be met to qualify for the company’s Green Finance Framework, for which it obtained a $2.1 billion securitization in 2021.

Flexential also plans to take advantage of the growth of artificial intelligence tools. “Our fifth-generation design is optimized to support the rapidly growing power and density requirements of AI and GPU-driven high performance compute deployments,” said Harrell.