US operator TierPoint is expanding its data center footprint in St. Louis, Missouri.

The company this week announced the acquisition of a building in downtown St. Louis that it plans to retrofit into an enterprise-grade data center.

The acquired building, located at 2300 Locust Street, totals 135,800 square feet. Over the next year, the first phase of investment will build out 22,600 square feet of data center production space and 5MW of utility power.

Subsequent phases of the investment plan will build out additional space in the building, scaling the facility over time to 20MW of utility power and 13 MW of critical load. The company will be investing up to $150 million in the project.

A major Fortune 100 company has reportedly signed as an anchor tenant, but TierPoint didn’t name the customer.

“This major planned investment is a direct response to the exceedingly strong demand we're seeing for data center services. It also demonstrates our commitment to the region and faith in downtown St. Louis," said Jerry Kent, chairman and CEO of TierPoint. "As elsewhere, we expect the new facility will be a landing spot for large-scale, high-density colocation services required for artificial intelligence and other compute-intensive, GPU-accelerated workloads.”

2300 Locust Street, also known as the NSI Building and previously the Willys Overland Building was constructed in 1917. The six-story building was originally the home of automaker Willys’ (later known as Kaiser Jeep) main dealership in the city. The site was sold to the American Fixture and Manufacturing Company in the 1930s, and sold again in the 1960s, after which it was leased to multiple companies.

The NSI building was put up for sale last year after its landlord sued the sole tenant for allegedly not paying rent. The site served as the headquarters for marketing firm Ansira (previously National System Inc.) since 2005.

“The state of Missouri and the St. Louis region, in particular, are open for business, and Ameren Missouri is excited to power growth in the data center industry," added Mark Birk, president of local utility Ameren Missouri. "We welcome TierPoint's expansion in downtown St. Louis and look forward to its plans to grow even more in the years to come. Through our Smart Energy Plan, we've been able to attract businesses to the region and help companies grow while providing reliable energy to meet the power needs of our customers today and tomorrow.”

TierPoint currently operates two other data centers in St. Louis, at 2315 Millpark Drive and 1111 Olive Street. The former launched in August 2022, and the latter was taken over when TierPoint acquired Cosentry in January 2016.

Cosentry took over the Olive Street site in 2014 after acquiring Xiolink, which had bought the building in 2009 and converted it into a data center.