An enterprise data center in Elk River, Minnesota, has been sold.
Finance & Commerce reports a UnitedHealth Group data center at 14100 Business Center Dr. NW in Sherburne County’s Elk River recently sold for $90 million.
Both the buyer and whether the health company was looking for a sale-leaseback type agreement is unclear. Sitting on around 20 acres, the building spans approximately 240,000 sq ft (22,300 sqm). It is next door to another data center, reportedly owned by Target.
Update: BizJournal reports the facility was bought by CloudHQ-affiliated Cristobal Ventures LLC. Cristobal shares an address with Cloud Capital, an affiliate of CloudHQ. While UnitedHealth was still reportedly operating out of the facility, ownership had passed to a JP Morgan Chase-related entity.
UnitedHealth has operated the facility since around 2007. The company announced plans to build a second Minnesota facility in Chaska in 2010. According to a Business Journal article from 2010, the Elk River facility cost UnitedHealth around $125 million to build.
The Sherburne County area was where Google had until recently been planning a new data center; several other companies still have projects planned nearby.
The search giant had been in talks to develop the $600 million site near the Sherco power plant since 2017, but its electric service agreement was terminated last month as it ended work on the project.
At least two other projects are still coming to the area. In September 2022, Elk River Technologies announced that it was buying 348 acres of land from Xcel near the Sherco plant for a $1 billion data center project. Elk River is a shell company created to obfuscate the identity of the real company behind the project.
This November, a third Fortune 100 company said that it would build a data center worth up to $700m near the power plant. Going by Amber Kestral, it also kept its identity a secret.
All three projects are linked to energy company Xcel, which is aiming to sell hundreds of acres of land adjacent to its power stations for the developments.
CloudHQ is planning a 180MW data center campus in the Chaska area of Minneapolis.