Digital Realty eyes DTLA parking garage for data center

Digital Realty Trust aims to replace a 60-year-old parking garage on a prime Downtown Los Angeles block with a 13-story computer data center.

The Austin-based data storage REIT wants to redevelop the five-story garage at 727-737 South Grand Avenue, Urbanize Los Angeles reported. The official applicant was GIP 7th Street, based in San Francisco.

Plans call for bulldozing the 1960s-era parking garage and replacing it with a windowless tower across from Whole Foods and Bottega Louie.

The proposed 486,000-square-foot building would be filled with computer servers and supporting equipment for private clients.

Although few employees would work at the data center, it would contain parking on its second and third floors, plus 13,300 square feet of windowless offices.

To break up the monotony of the 279-foot-tall building, “a playful system of angled panels” would provide “articulation,” according to the filing.

The project is surrounded by the fruits of Downtown’s recent boom, not far from the Bloc, the Atelier apartment tower and the new Freehand hotel. It’s also north of where Mitsui Fudosan America has proposed building a 50-story, 580-unit apartment tower on 8th Street.

While most of Downtown’s growth and construction in the past decade has been hotels and housing, data centers are not without precedent, according to Urbanize.

A former department store to the north on 7th Street now functions as a data center, as does the One Wilshire high-rise at 624 South Grand Avenue.

The former Post Office Annex near Union Station has been turned into a data center, and a 180,000-square-foot data center recently replaced a parking lot next door.

Digital Realty, which claims to be the world’s largest data center provider, has more than 300 data centers that serve more than 250 Fortune 500 companies, according to its website. In 2021, the real estate investment trust moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin.

— Dana Bartholomew