Harrison Street Raises $600M for Data Center Investment  

Harrison Street has raised roughly $600 million across its HS Digital Fund and associated vehicles. This marks the company’s first dedicated pool of capital for data center investment.

The firm expanded its digital assets platform due to the surging data consumption, according to prepared remarks by Michael Hochanadel, managing director at Harrison Street.

Over the past seven years, the firm has committed more than $5.6 billion to powered shells, carrier hotels and colocation sites, as well as dark fiber assets. Harrison Street invested in more than 24 digital assets encompassing about 6.5 million square feet of data centers and north of 2.1 gigawatts of capacity.

Last May, the company acquired a 50-acre site in Irving, Texas, in partnership with PowerHouse. Plans call for the construction of a roughly 1 million-square-foot data center campus with a capacity of 200 megawatts at full build-out.

Five months earlier, the same joint venture closed on another site for a data center campus, this time in Reno, Nev. The stated goal was to construct a 900,000-square-foot facility estimated at $400 million.

Data center development grows despite energy shortage

The U.S. data center capacity is set to grow from 22 gigawatts in 2024 to 26 gigawatts in 2025, according to JLL’s Global Data Center Outlook. This year, the company forecasts 4.4 gigawatts of new construction to break ground across the nation.  

The strained power grid remains among the largest roadblocks for new data center developments. In Virginia alone, data centers represent more than 25 percent of the energy demand. A solution that gained traction is the implementation of nuclear energy for data centers.

The Stargate Project, which aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years to build new OpenAI infrastructure across the U.S., could also use nuclear energy, according to Bloomberg. Of the investment pool, $100 billion is slated for immediate deployment.