Taken from the DuPont Fabros website, a photograph of the company's ACC5 facility, currently under construction in Ashburn, Virginia.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Data center operator DuPont Fabros Technology (www.dft.com) announced on Thursday that it has closed on a $150 million secured loan in order to continue to fund the construction of its massive ACC5 data center project in Ashburn, Virginia.
According to the announcement, the loan was secured with a syndicate of lenders led by TD Bank, and is secured by the newly constructed facility. DuPont Fabros says it intends to use the loan to repay the $25 million loan that is currently secured by the facility, as well as to fund the second phase of its construction. An interest reserve of $10 million will be set aside under the terms of the loan.
The company says the loan also includes an accordion feature that allows new lenders to join the existing syndicate and increase the loan up to an additional $100 million, if certain conditions are met.
The announcement of new debt financing, particularly for data center construction projects, is welcome news in the hosting space, where several years of trepidation among lenders has created a slowdown in construction and a circumstance where, in some regions, demand for data center space is greatly outpacing supply.
This subject – along with the phrase “borrowed $150 million to build a data center” – came up last week, when data center firm CyrusOne announced that it had secured a $150 million loan. As mentioned in that story, the state of lending and data center construction was a hot topic at September’s Tier 1 Research Hosting Transformation Summit, and was covered in the October issue of WHIR magazine.
“We are pleased to have secured this loan in a challenging credit environment,” says Hossein Fateh, president and CEO of DuPont Fabros, quoted in the company’s press release. “This loan will allow us to continue to make progress on our development pipeline by completing Phase II of ACC5. We now expect that ACC5 Phase II will be placed in service in October 2010.”
According to the DuPont Fabros website, ACC5 is designed for an aggregate of 36.4 MW of critical IT load capacity, and will ultimately be a 360,000 square foot facility with more than 176,200 square feet of raised floor space. Customers will be able to lease one or more dedicated rooms with 568.75 kW, 1,137.5 kW, or 2,275 kW of critical power.
Construction on the building began in April of 2008.
In November of this year, the company completed two new tenant leases at ACC5, though the clients were not identified. As of November 30, says the company, Phase I of the facility was 79 percent leased, and Phase II was 50 percent leased.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
