Uptown Charlotte office building to be removed to make way for 4-story data center
Nearly two acres of an uptown Charlotte block, including a historic office building, could soon be replaced by a four-story data center.
Digital Trade Street 2 plans to build a 12-megawatt data center at 725 E. Trade St., according to a land development construction plan submitted recently to the city of Charlotte. Digital Trade Street 2 is the limited liability company of Austin, Texas-based Digital Realty Trust.
A 12MW data center uses electricity roughly equivalent to about 10,000 U.S. homes annually, according to Congressional Research Service.
Digital Realty has owned and operated a data center on the site in uptown Charlotte for years, the company said Thursday in a statement to The Charlotte Observer. “Due to ongoing demand for connectivity and colocation data center capacity by the metro’s strong local economy and rapid digital transformation, we are pursuing expansion to better support both new and existing customers,” Digital Realty said.
The company’s construction plan calls for removing the existing surface parking lot, a two-story brick building and one-story block building. The buildings, both part of The Court Arcade, were built in the mid-1920s by architect William Peeps, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commissions website. The office buildings, totaling 18,573-square-foot on Trade Street between North Myers and North Alexander streets, are home to several attorneys’ offices.
Digital Realty will construct a new four-story data center building with a mechanical yard for supporting electrical equipment and a truck delivery driveway off East Fifth Street, according to the construction plan.
Digitial Realty did not say how much it’s investing in the project.
Data centers have been around since 1945. Data centers are large facilities filled with computers and related equipment used for storing, processing and distributing digital information. The energy demand of Digital Realty’s project pales in comparison to recently proposed hyperscale data centers that have been igniting opposition across the Charlotte region, including in Statesville, Mooresville and Matthews. Others have been approved without fanfare, such as Amazon’s $10 billion center in Richmond County and York County’s first mega data center near Lake Wylie. The booming demand is being fueled by artificial intelligence.
What’s on the uptown Charlotte block now?
Digital Realty purchased the two First Ward properties in March for $16 million, Mecklenburg County property records show. The acquisition allows Digital Realty to “expand its IT capacity for cloud, enterprise and colocation customers,” the company said in its first-quarter earnings report.
The company also owns 731 E. Trade St., 113 North Myers St. and 125 North Myers St., on the same block as the uptown data center construction plan. Digital Realty purchased the three parcels in 2005 for about $17.3 million, property records show.
Cogent Communications Charlotte owns the remaining property on the same uptown block at 701 E. Trade St. Cogent purchased the nearly one-acre site along North Alexander Street for almost $15 million in 2019, property records show. The office and data center is one of three in North Carolina for the publicly-traded internet company, which was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Other locations in the state are a data center at 1310 S. Mint St. and another in Raleigh, according to the company’s website.
Digital Realty expanding in Charlotte
Digital Realty also plans to build the biggest data center in North Carolina in west Charlotte after receiving rezoning approval in May, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
A 3-million-square-foot data center will be built on 156 acres at 12899 Moores Chapel Road, near the Catawba River. The site will house two buildings that could support up to 400 megawatts of IT capacity. Digital Realty purchased the property last November for $160 million.
Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers in more than 25 countries.
