A new tenant has been secured for two planned build-to-suit data facilities in Northern Virginia by Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT). Last week, the company disclosed that it had signed two long-term leasing agreements for two build-to-suit facilities in Northern Virginia in January with an unidentified "Fortune 500" company. The plants' exact locations and anticipated power capacity were kept a secret. The 225,000-square-foot initial project is expected to reach shell finalization in the second quarter of 2025. The shell completion date for the second project, which is 193,000 square feet, is set for the final quarter of 2025.
REIT companies like COPT own, manage, lease, develop, and occasionally acquire office and data center buildings. According to its most recent statistics, COPT now owns about five million square feet of data shell space spread over 27 single-tenant buildings that are entirely leased. About 19 were controlled through joint ventures at the time of its Q3 results, all with Blackstone.
The company has three buildings under construction, totalling 647,000 developable square feet, and about 33 acres are reserved for future data center shells.
COPT sold CloudHQ's investment division, its sole wholesale-operated data center in Manassas, Virginia, for $222.5 million last year.
The business recently established two new joint projects with Blackstone Real Estate, which later bought a 90% stake in five data center shell sites with single tenants, totalling over 1.1 million square feet and worth $278 million. The companies have created a number of data center JVs, and this one is the most recent.
