Iron Mountain Signs 20 Megawatt Lease in Northern Virginia

Iron Mountain has signed a 20 megawatt multi-year lease with a Fortune 100 customer in its VA-2 data center in Manassas, Virginia, the company said this week.  As a result, Iron Mountain will update the design of its Manassas facility to support 36 megawatts of power capacity, up from 30 megawatts previously.

Iron Mountain has now signed leases totaling 44 megawatts year to date, exceeding its previous target of 30 megawatts for the full-year 2021.

“We continue to see strong demand for comprehensive data center solutions from our existing customer base,” said Mark Kidd, Executive Vice President and General Manager Iof ron Mountain Data Centers. “This 20-megawatt lease is indicative of our continued ability to support that demand and it reflects our commitment to strategically partner with our customers to meet their individual requirements.”

The huge lease highlights the continuing demand for data center capacity in Northern Virginia, which is home to more than 150 data centers and tens of millions of square feet of data center space. As the cloud grows, having servers in the region has become the table stakes for companies with ambitions in cloud computing.

Iron Mountain is a fairly recent arrival in the Northern Virginia, opening its Manassas campus in the fall of 2017. In early 2020 the company announced plans for VA-2, a $225 million second data center building.

The new lease will gradually fill a major chunk of that capacity,  and is expected to commence in phases from mid-2022 through mid-2023. The deal reflects Iron Mountain’s ability to compete for big deals in the world’s busiest and most competitive data center market.

“Partnering with our customers in order to meet their individual needs is a key part of our core values and necessary to keep pace with our collective growth strategies,” said Dottie Spruce, Head of Global Accounts, Iron Mountain Data Centers. “Offering a varied capacity portfolio enables us to meet the demands of both our retail customers as well as our hyperscale clients. The balance also enables us to effectively manage lease commencement dates and backlog revenue to manage our future growth.”

Iron Mountain’s data center operations are a growing segment of the company’s business. Iron Mountain is a leading provider of document storage, with more than 225,000 customers around the globe, with a real estate network of more than 90 million square feet across more than 1,480 facilities. The company’s growing global data center footprint spans more than 3.5 million square feet across 15 locations on three continents.

Iron Mountain has ramped up its data center operations in recent years through acquisitions (including FORTRUST,  IO, EvoSwitch and sale/leasebacks of enterprise facilities) and construction of purpose-built infrastructure in markets like Northern Virginia, Singapore and Phoenix.