Data Centers Are Popping Up Everywhere in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELS–The rapid expansion of the data center sector in the past two years has largely been a horizontal endeavor—with industry players seeking large tracts of undeveloped land for one- or two-story hyperscale facilities that encompass more than 400,000 square feet.

A redevelopment disclosed this week in Los Angeles may be a sign that data centers increasingly will expand vertically as well as horizontally.

San Francisco-based Digital Realty has filed plans to convert a five-story parking garage in Downtown Los Angeles into a 13-story, 486K SF facility that will primarily be used as a data center, Urbanize Los Angeles reported.

The building at 727-737 S. Grand Ave. will feature parking facilities on the second and third floors and include 13K SF office space, according to the plans. The plans call for a windowless building, which could present some challenges to the cooling system for the servers.

Digital Realty’s project will sit in the middle of a cluster of new data centers in DTLA that were the result of some creative adaptive re-use projects.

A surface parking lot next door to Digital Realty’s site has been replaced by a data center; a former department store located to the north on 7th Street and a high-rise at One Wilshire also have been adapted for server farms, as was the former Post Office Annex near Union Station, Urbanize LA reported.

Earlier this week, the largest data center customer in the US opened new frontier in the expansion of the data center cluster in Northern Virginia: Amazon announced plans to demolish up to a dozen suburban office buildings in Loudoun and Fairfax counties and replace them will new server farms.

The cloud-computing leader will replace the office campuses with five data centers encompassing nearly 1M SF, the Washington Business Journal reported.

In Sterling, Amazon will take down three office buildings at the Loudoun Commerce Center on Nokes Boulevard, on a site the tech giant purchased from Virginia-based Clark-Hooke Corp. for $31M last summer.

Amazon also will demolish three offices at the Loudoun Tech Center on Ridgetop Circle, a site acquired in January 2022 from St. John Properties; a third location—which will also see three office buildings topple under Amazon’s plan—at Manekin Plaza was purchased from in investment fund for $21M in 2021.

According to plans filed with Loudoun County, Amazon will build a two-story, 312K SF data center at the Nokes site and a three-story, 313K SF data center at Manekin Plaza. A pair of server farms encompassing more than 300K SF are planned for the Tech Center property.

Amazon also is razing a two-building site in Fairfax County for redevelopment into a data center, the report said.