Ascent buys former BlackBerry data centre
St. Louis-based firm pays $74.5M for property
CAMBRIDGE — BlackBerry has sold a sprawling data centre in Cambridge to a U.S. company that provides cloud computing services.
Ascent paid $74.5 million for 66 acres of land with a building containing 350,000 square feet of space on 17 Vondrau Dr., according to information from the RealTrack database, a subscription service that publishes commercial real estate transactions.
The transaction includes the building next door, a former BlackBerry building at 800 Maple Grove Rd.
Ascent also paid US$30 million for a BlackBerry data centre in Georgia. Both transactions closed Feb 24.
St. Louis-based Ascent has been in the data centre business for about 20 years. It designs, builds and operates more than 1,500 data centres across North America.
The company describes the Toronto-Waterloo Region Corridor as the second largest innovation cluster in North America, and a world renowned area for high tech.
“We feel, strategically, it is a good time to be in that market,” Phil Horstmann, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview Tuesday.
“It is a huge market, a financial powerhouse, lots of population density for the types of customers we work with.”
The transaction for the data centre, known as TOR1, is a leaseback deal so BlackBerry will continue to use the centre. But there is a lot of room to expand and accommodate new customers, said Horstmann.
“There is data centre space that is substantially complete that we can bring to market very quickly for users,” he said, adding that there is 120,000 square feet of additional space for expansion, “what we would call powered shell — like an industrial building with inner utilities and fibre.”
There also is about 40 acres of “pad-ready ground” for further expansion, Horstmann said.
Ascent employs five people at the data centre and said it is looking to hire at least two more.
BlackBerry has sold all of its data centres to lower costs and gain efficiencies, Sarah McKinney, of the Waterloo-based company’s corporate communications, said in an email. It continues to lease space in the data centres, she said.
A growing number of large companies find themselves with underutilized data centres, Horstmann said. Ascent is willing to partner with other enterprise users to help maximize the expensive assets, he said.
Ascent is impressed with the technology sector in the Toronto-Waterloo Region Innovation
Corridor, which has about 15,000 technology companies. It is North America’s second largest technology cluster after Silicon Valley.
“That’s pretty exciting,” said Horstmann. “We work all over North America, and what is going on in that region is quite exciting.”
The TOR1 data centre is described as a hardened data centre with 10 layers of physical security, including closed circuit TV, badge and access controls, and on-site personnel 24-7. It can provide up to 70 megawatts of critical power.
“Local universities, startups and companies, from large Canadian tech companies to major global businesses, continue to expand and invest heavily in the region,” Horstmann said in a news release.
“Ascent TOR1 is well positioned to support the increased demand in this fast-growing economy.”