Prime Opens Data Center in Vernon Leased to Two AI Firms

Prime Data Center has opened a 242,500-square-foot data center in Vernon, the heart of industrial Los Angeles.

The Dallas-based firm launched Prime Los Angeles, a three-story computing facility at 4701 South Santa Fe Avenue, Data Centre Dynamics reported. It replaced a 225,000-square-foot warehouse.

The data center is fully leased by two artificial intelligence companies and will deliver 33 megawatts of power at full build-out. It’s powered by a city-owned utility.

In January last year, Prime announced it had secured a 12 megawatt lease with a “large, publicly-traded technology company” that’s still not disclosed.

This summer, Prime leased 21 megawatts to San Jose-based Supermicro, which then subleased its power to Lambda Labs, a startup also based in Silicon Valley, according to a regulatory filing.

The 10-year sublease was valued at $600 million, according to DCD.

The cost of the Prime Los Angeles data center, planned in 2022 on 4.4 acres, was not disclosed.

Prime’s data center portfolio is largely in California, with other campuses in Dallas, Austin, Chicago and Phoenix.

Prime Data Center, founded in 2018, counts Macquarie Capital as an investor. It announced plans to move into Europe last year with a three-building, 124 megawatt campus in Saeby, in northern Denmark. A 40 megawatt site is also planned in Madrid, Spain.

With the logistics warehouse market in a slump this summer, many commercial investors turned to data centers, which have become key to a boom in artificial intelligence.

In July, San Francisco-based Prologis announced it had set its sites on data centers — which store, process and distribute digital data and applications and the energy facilities needed to power artificial intelligence — to boost profitability.

Demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure like data centers and energy facilities provides “tremendous confidence in future growth,” Hamid Moghadam, CEO of Prologis, told investors.

This spring, Goldman Sachs Group estimated that data-center power demand will grow 160 percent by 2030, in part because of artificial intelligence.

This week, Canada-based Westbank and PG&E, a Northern California utility, announced a plan to heat new residential highrises in San Jose with the excess energy from data centers next door.

— Dana Bartholomew