Sentinel Ashburn: Sentinel buys Washington Dulles Gateway for $82.5m

Sentinel Data Centers is buying a 280-acre plot in Dulles, Loudoun County, for $82.5m.

One of the largest available properties for data center development in the region, the site was marketed by real estate management company Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) on behalf of its majority owner, H. Christopher Antigone. Named the Washington Dulles Gateway by JLL, it offfers a net constructible area of 140 acres.

Wise choice

QTS Data Centers came close to buying the property in October last year, however whether the wholesale provider pulled out - or Sentinel put a better offer forward - is unclear. QTS did not immediately respond to requests for comment made by DCD.

JLL managing director Mark Levy said that his team had “worked diligently through leveraging our global platform to identify the most qualified buyer” for the site.

“Given the significant demand that continues to exist for data center product in Loudoun County, we were able to achieve a tremendous outcome for our client,” he added.

North Virginia is indeed one of the world’s densest data center markets, offering rich interconnectivity and availability of qualified professionals and power. Furthermore, favorable tax regime and regulations have helped turn the region into a data processing hub.

Sentinel first entered the market last year, when it bought a portion of AOL’s campus in Sterling, which was put on sale after AOL was purchased by Verizon in 2015.

Sentinel owns and operates two single-tenant data centers in the United States. The first is a 130,000 square foot (12,000 sq m) facility in Rockland County, New York, and the other, located in Memphis, Tennessee, spans 40,000 square feet (3,700 sq m).

Though it formerly owned other facilities in North Carolina and New Jersey, it sold these to CyrusOne last year for $490m.

Source: Datacenter Dynamics