Gigawatt-scale data centre developer, Quantum Loophole, has announced that Aligned Data Centers has signed an agreement to acquire land, power, and water at its campus in Frederick County, Maryland. The agreement provides Aligned with additional, strategic expansion capacity, enabling rapid scale to meet the needs of its customers in a highly land-and power-constrained region.
Frederick County will be Aligned’s third hyperscale data centre campus in the region, with additional expansion planned for 2022. Their first mover advantage helps ensure that Aligned can leverage the new Maryland data centre tax incentives.
Located just 20 miles from the center of Ashburn, Virginia’s interconnection ecosystem in Loudoun County, Quantum Loophole’s Frederick County site not only provides the equivalent of Virginia’s sales and use tax exemption associated with data centre infrastructure and servers, but it also takes advantage of Maryland’s exemption of personal property tax on certain data centre infrastructure and servers. This aspect could prove significantly beneficial to hyperscale, colocation and enterprise data centre owners and operators.
Furthermore, Quantum Loophole’s planned custom fibre build, QLoop, will connect the Frederick County site to Loudoun County, Virginia via an ultra-high count fibre optic cable system, enabling automatic cross-connections and fully redundant regional fibre connectivity, potentially capable of sub-millisecond latency between the two counties.
Gartner projects global spending on data centre systems will grow to $226 billion in 2022, up 11.4 per cent year over year. The demand for data centre capacity is at an all-time high, spurred by digital transformation initiatives and demand for cloud services. As data centre needs accelerate, the associated land, power, water, and connectivity continue to be constrained, as the cost of land and the infrastructure required to support data centre development also increases.
Aligned’s commitment to sustainability in future developments was a key driving force behind the decision to secure land in Quantum Loophole’s first mass-scale data centre development project.
“Aligned’s ability to acquire power- and connectivity-rich land in strategic regions is critical to delivering infrastructure at the quality and velocity our customers have come to expect,” commented Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Data Centers. “The attractive tax exemptions, power availability, proximity to Northern Virginia, and holistic approach to enabling data centre development were key drivers in our decision to choose Frederick County. The expansion comes on the heels of Aligned’s ORD-01 data center launch and the groundbreaking of ORD-02 in Chicago, with more than 400 MW of additional capacity planned in the Northern Virginia region alone.”
Josh Snowhorn, founder and CEO of Quantum Loophole, said: “Location is everything in the data centre industry, and Aligned Data Centers is one of the first to recognise this opportunity for their future development needs. Quantum Loophole identified a location in proximity to a market that has sparse availability for future development. With more than 2,100 acres of land, our Frederick County community is purposely designed to support mass-scale data centre developments including gigawatts of power, recycled water, and dedicated connectivity in an automated environment.
“Our sales funnel is bursting with interest. Now is the time for companies to make their commitments to ensure their future data center developments are in the right location, with the right infrastructure, and the right incentives to make it accessible.”
