California-based real estate group Panattoni Development is looking to develop data centers across North America.
The company plans to develop 1GW of data center capacity over the next five years, which it says is equivalent to the power needed for around 876,000 homes.
Panattoni plans on building the data centers on plots of land it already owns, in addition to purchasing new properties. Each data center building will have an IT capacity between 100 and 500MW.
The decision comes with the appointment of Adam Kramer as the lead of the data center team. Kramer has previously held roles as the CEO of nZero and executive vice president of strategy at Switch.
“You want to be where the customer is, and right now the customer wants to be in the data center world,” said Doug Roberts, president of Panattoni’s North American development group.
Founded in 1986, Panattoni has developed around 625 million square feet of office, logistics, and industrial space in the US alone.
The firm’s European unit has branched out into data center builds and announced plans to build a 48MW campus outside Barcelona, Spain, in April 2023.
In 2022, the European unit abandoned plans to build a data center in the UK in the Borehamwood area of London alongside Pure Data Centres. The two companies planned and were granted permission to develop a three-story, 41,763 sqm (449,500 sq ft) data center set to offer up to 50MW of capacity. However, the deal did not compete, reportedly due to energy constraints in the area impacting development timelines.
Vacancy rates in North America have been declining, according to a recent report from CBRE, thereby driving up rental rates. North America is seeing the highest increase globally of 20 percent year over year.
