Digital Realty Trust, a leading global provider of data centre solutions, hosted a ground-breaking ceremony this morning to celebrate the start of construction on a major expansion of its Northern Virginia data centre campus in Ashburn, Virginia. The new two-story 214,000 sq ft world-class data centre facility is the fourth building to be developed at the campus in recent years by Digital Realty. 

The new facility is designed to meet the technical requirements of companies seeking best-in-class data center solutions. The building has the capacity to accommodate up to ten 1.125 megawatt data center PODs, featuring airside economization that will enable customers to achieve among the lowest PUEs in the industry.

"This project presents an exciting opportunity for us to offer customers in the Northern Virginia market our full suite of data center solutions in a state of the art facility designed for flexibility, reliability and efficiency," said Dave Caron, Senior Vice President, Portfolio Management at Digital Realty. "From a highly customized build-to-suit data center to our move-in ready suites with dedicated, redundant power and cooling infrastructure, and Powered Base Building solutions, we believe that this facility will be able to accommodate a large majority of the data center requirements from customers seeking space in this highly strategic market." 

The building shell and core is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012 followed by the first three 1.125 megawatt, purpose-built data centers, available in the second quarter of 2013. "Our strategy is to have inventory readily available for customers in our top data center markets," said Michael F. Foust, Chief Executive Officer for Digital Realty."With our existing facilities nearly fully leased within the Ashburn campus, we expect the timely delivery of this new space a year from now to satisfy customers' data center requirements for the foreseeable future."