Serverfarm has acquired two data centers around Houston, Texas.
The Manulife-owned company announced the acquisition this week, marking its entry into the Texas market.
The sites combined total 250 acres and more than 500MW; both campuses have on-site substations with unused available capacity.
Terms of the deal were not shared.
The transaction was funded with equity commitments from Manulife Investment Management - on behalf of Manulife Infrastructure Funds II and III and its affiliates - and other minority shareholders.
"Serverfarm's innovative approach to providing near-term capacity directly addresses hyperscale customer requirements in a sustainable, future-proof manner," said Avner Papouchado, CEO, Serverfarm. "Our entry into Houston is our largest data center investment to date, demonstrating our continued focus on serving our customers' needs."
The newly-acquired HOU1 data center facility has a current capacity of 350,000 sq ft with line-of-sight of 410MW of customer capacity.
The HOU2 data center campus spans almost half a million sq ft across two buildings with secured customer capacity to scale to 100MW using available existing grid power.
Serverfarm said its phased development plan for the sites is focused on maximizing capacity within the existing data center building shells prior to future expansion.
Serverfarm said the first phase of one campus is pre-leased to an unnamed large customer.
While the company didn't share addresses or the seller, both facilities were likely previously occupied by HP/DXC. Images of the two sites on Serverfarm's website match those of two known HP/DXC data centers in Northwest Houston.
HOU1 matches 28401 Betka Road in Hockley, Harris County. The site was built around 2006 amid a major data center consolidation program by HP that saw the company build facilities in Houston, Austin, and Atlanta.
HOU2 matches 15555 Cutten Road, a two-building campus close to the former Compaq/HP HQ in Cypress Creek. Online listings suggest this is a DXC site.
DXC Technology was founded in 2017 after HPE merged its enterprise services business with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). In 2019, DXC Technology said it had "43 owned or leased sites globally, in addition to over 250 managed colo locations."
However, last year DXC said it would move around 1,000 of its largest IT outsourcing customers to Amazon Web Services (AWS), selecting AWS as its primary cloud provider as it looked to divest some of its data centers. DXC facilities have since been sold or put up for sale in Detroit, Michigan; São Paulo, Brazil; and Juarez, Mexico.
The former Compaq/HP HQ has separately been turned into a data center campus by ViVaVerse Solutions.
Serverfarm, founded in 2009 by real estate development firm Red Sea Group, was acquired by Manulife last year. The company operates eight other data centers across North America, Europe, and Israel with a total of 1.5 million gross sq ft (139,400 sqm) of data center space and 125MW of IT capacity.
The Houston seller was advised by CBRE Data Center Capital Markets.
