Skybox sells Houston Facility to Element Critical

Element Critical has acquired Skybox's Houston One facility. Element Critical is the new owner, but Skybox will continue to operate the facility and handle wholesale leasing.

Skybox and Element Critical jointly issued the press release below on March 16th 2021:

Vienna, VA, — Element Critical, a leading provider of tailored data center services, today announced the acquisition of Skybox Datacenters’ state-of-the-art Houston One facility. This purchase accelerates Element Critical’s plans to expand its national footprint, adding a strategic high-performance data center asset that provides inherent flexibility for supporting medium to large enterprise customers at the edge.

“Texas is a strategic market for Element Critical, and we are excited to have acquired a facility in the Houston Energy corridor where we can apply our hands-on operational expertise in delivering hybrid colocation services in Houston and across our growing data center platform,” said Ken Parent, CEO of Element Critical. Parent continues “in addition, the Skybox team will continue to play an important role in supporting Element Critical in many key aspects of the project, particularly as they relate to serving the impressive tenant roster they have developed.”

“This dynamic collaboration between Element Critical, Skybox Datacenters, and the world-class customers at Houston One will enable new opportunities for growth, digital infrastructure optimization, and high perfomance computing while also maintaining strong operational and development capacities moving forward,” said Rob Morris, CEO of Skybox Datacenters. “Our team is eager to support the Element Critical team to continue to offer the best data center solution in the Houston metroplex and to grow the campus as new opportunities develop.”

Delivering tenants bespoke customization has always been a top priority for the Element Critical team. Now, we have the ability to provide Texas enterprises and cloud providers substantial cost savings and flexibility through Houston One’s unique electric service identifier (ESID) Primary Meter Program. Enabled via dedicated primary transformers, this solution allows wholesale customers to competitively select power from the supplier of their choice – a rare feature in the industry that translates into extensive and repeatable savings for customers.

Houston One is known for its robust N+1 and 2N design and flexible deployment innovation. The purpose-built facility caters to enterprise users requiring 100% uptime for high-performance computing and latency-sensitive deployments for this region, and access to renewable power.

The addition of this strategic mission-critical facility enables Element Critical to serve an increasingly comprehensive range of enterprise customers across a growing platform that includes data centers in Sunnyvale-California, Chicago-Illinois, Tyson’s Corner-Virginia, and Houston-Texas.