Data company buys Chandler building for $115M – SanTan Sun … – San Tan Sun News

SanTan Sun News Staff
A Texas data center company has shelled out $115 million for a nearly half-million-square-foot office building in the Continuum business park in Chandler
Aligned Adaptive Data Centers bought the 456,122-square-foot building at 2501 S. Price Road near Dobson Road as part of an effort to expand its Phoenix Metro footprint with two “mega campuses.”
Valley real estate tracker vizzda.com reported that 27-year-old building sites on 26 acres and that the sale also includes an 11,085-square-foot storage warehouse built in 1975 and another 17-acre parking lot.
The sale price represented a per-square-foot price of $252 and that no debt was recorded with the purchase from Southwest Value Partners, vizzda said.
Southwest Value Partners is a real estate development firm co-founded by Robert Sarver, the controversial owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball team.
Sarver’s firm owns the 152-acre Continuum, which was a Motorola research site that was sold in 2009 to an Austin, Texas real estate investment firm that began transforming the property into a technology park with the backing of Chandler development officials, who felt it was not being used to its full potential.
The city also in the early years of this century offered incentives to companies that wanted to build on the site and spent $10 million on infrastructure improvements that included new roads, water and sewer systems, landscaping and water features.
Sarver’s firm bought Continuum in February 2014 for $51.8 million.
Marketing materials supplied by vizzda show that Continuum is broken into nine other parcels besides the one purchased by Aligned. Those ranged in size from 3.8 to 34 acres with office buildings ranging between 20,000 square feet to 300,000 square feet, according to marketing materials.
The park is served by four cable companies and can tap into more than 100 million gallons of water provided annually by the city and Salt River Project, according to the marketing materials.
Aligned in a news release on its website did not name the Chandler or the other Valley site in announcing its expansion, which it said “will provide customers with essential capacity and scalability in one of the nation’s fastest-growing data center markets.”
Asked why the sites were not named, an Aligned spokeswoman said, “If the information is not disclosed it is confidential.”
“Aligned is focused on meeting the capacity demands of our customers today, while constantly innovating across every aspect of our business to ensure their future data center requirements will be met long term,” said Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap.
“Our expansion in greater Phoenix is an example of Aligned’s power-first approach to asset procurement as well as strategic investments across our design and construction, supply chain and vendor managed inventory program, and team to deliver capacity at maximum speed and scale.”
The company also has operations in Chicago, Dallas, Maryland, northern Virginia and Salt Lake City.
In announcing its Arizona expansion, Aligned said, “In addition to extensive fiber access and a diverse energy mix, the Phoenix market is also a viable alternative to California as a Western data center location due to its relatively inexpensive power cost and low disaster risk.
“Aligned Phoenix customers can also take advantage of its 20-year sales tax exemption on data center equipment.”
Aligned bills itself as “a leading technology infrastructure company offering innovative, sustainable, and adaptive scale data centers and build-to-scale solutions for global hyperscale and enterprise customers.”
“By reducing the energy, water and space needed to operate, our data center solutions, combined with our patented cooling technology, offer businesses a competitive advantage by improving sustainability, reliability, and their bottom line,” Aligned says.

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