5C Data Centers to Develop Facility Near Downtown Phoenix

A second Canadian developer has joined the data center stampede in Phoenix.

5C Data Centers, based in Montreal, has filed plans to build a 140,000-square-foot facility near Downtown, the Phoenix Business Journal and Data Center Dynamics reported.

The address of the project was undisclosed.

5C said on Sept. 18 that its first development in the region will be the Downtown-adjacent facility known as PHX01, with 20 megawatts of power capacity. It declined to give more details about the project, including its cost and location.

That new data center would accommodate demanding artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, supporting densities of up to 132 kilowatts per cabinet.

5C Data Centers, founded last year by CEO Steve Perez, provides data centers for hyperscalers, cloud providers and enterprise clients with other projects already operating in Ohio and Texas, according to the Business Journal.

Perez, a founding member of Canadian firm Hypertec DCS, served as vice president of sales. Hypertec’s data center business in Canada was acquired by Vantage in 2020. Before that, he worked at Bell Canada.

5C recently acquired a 66,000-square-foot data center in Columbus, Ohio, for an undisclosed price. The company also lists a campus in the Dallas-Fort Worth market of Texas.

The Phoenix data center would be its third project.

“Expanding our footprint to Phoenix marks a significant milestone for 5C Data Centers as we continue to support the growing demand for high-performance and sustainable data center solutions,” Perez said in a statement.

Data centers are hot in the scorching desert around Phoenix.

Last month, Denver-based Tract paid $136 million for 2,100 acres of land outside Phoenix to develop a $20 billion data center campus. Construction of the 1.8 gigawatt campus, with 40 facilities across 20 million square feet, could take 15 years.

In the first half of the year, the data center industry in greater Phoenix had nearly 150 megawatts of net absorption, according to CBRE Group, with an inventory of 510 megawatts and 334 megawatts under construction.

The regional market had 3.3 percent vacancy, the lowest since 2016.

For the first time, greater Phoenix also topped Silicon Valley in new supply year-over-year with 150 new megawatts. Phoenix now ranks fourth in the nation for total inventory behind Northern Virginia’s 2,611 megawatts, Dallas-Fort Worth’s 591 megawatts and Chicago’s 589 megawatts.

Data centers throughout the U.S. now offer 6.7 gigawatts of capacity, excluding those owned and occupied by one tenant, according to CBRE. Facilities with more than 4.5 gigawatts of capacity will break ground by next year. One gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.

— Dana Bartholomew