NTT Delivers 16 MW Silicon Valley Data Center

SV1 Exterior. Photo courtesy of NTT.

NTT Global Data Centers Americas has entered the tight Silicon Valley data center market with the completion of its hyperscale facility in Santa Clara, Calif. SV1 is the provider’s first U.S. location to use its proprietary base isolation system developed in partnership with Earthquake Protection Systems.

Tokyo-based NTT Communications announced construction plans in 2019 at the Santa Clara site. At that time, NTT operated the RagingWire brand, now consolidated into NTT Global Data Centers Americas. NTT first acquired an 80 percent stake in colocation start-up RagingWire back in 2014—a $350 million investment—and achieved full ownership in 2018.

NTT’s four-story SV1 is a 160,000-square-foot data center, providing 64,000 square feet of IT space. It features an initial critical IT load of 5 MW, scalable to 16 MW, and more than 6,000 square feet of client storage and conference space. Available power densities range between 7kW and 20kW per rack.

Resilience in a high-barrier market

SV1 uses a base isolation system for protection against earthquakes. The design utilizes a combination of triple-friction pendulum pedestals and viscous dampers, meant to dissipate energy and reduce building displacement and allowing the structure to move up to 32 inches in any horizontal direction. According to NTT, several of its Japanese facilities have endured earthquakes of magnitudes up to 8.8 with systems performing within expectations.

The building is located on Walsh Avenue, in a high-density area just blocks from Digital Realty’s planned 430,000-square-foot campus. NTT’s facility offers access to multiple Tier-1 carriers, including Level 3, Frontier and Wholesale Networks—with more available via dark fiber. Cloud services include AWS, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, among others.

According to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report, Silicon Valley is one of the tightest data center markets in the U.S., with vacancy at 6 percent at the end of 2020, second only to Northern Virginia’s 3 percent. Lack of physical space has not stopped developers from adding more inventory, however, with multi-floor buildings becoming the norm. Other operators with data centers underway in Silicon Valley include Equinix and Vantage Data Centers.

The SV1 facility is NTT’s third such delivery this year. In February, the global data center provider opened two new campuses: a 72 MW property in Chicago and another in Hillsboro, Ore., with a deployment of 126 MW.