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A megachurch is the latest target for demolition by developers looking to build data centers in the land-constrained Bay Area market.
Vantage Data Centers is planning a data center campus on the site of San Jose’s Redemption Church, The Mercury News reports, citing municipal planning documents.
The proposed facility would be built on the church’s 9.8-acre property in the city’s Alviso district, continuing a trend of developers turning to brownfield sites in Silicon Valley’s notoriously tight data center market.
While the total square footage or planned power use of the proposed campus remains unclear, the property directly abuts an existing Google campus where the tech giant operates eight office, research and logistics facilities. The church property, owned by Jubilee Christian Center of San Jose since 1992, also sits next to the Alviso Tech Park and its existing electrical substation — an important consideration for data center builders.
At the center of the tech universe, the Bay Area remains one of the world’s most important digital infrastructure hubs and the second-largest data center market globally, according to CBRE. But even as demand for data center space far exceeds supply, it also remains one of the toughest markets to build new facilities, stymied in part by a lack of undeveloped land with access to the massive amounts of power data centers need.
As Bisnow has previously reported, developers like Vantage are increasingly turning to brownfield — whether former offices, logistics parks or, in this case, a church — to build data centers in Silicon Valley.
Vantage is no stranger to brownfield projects in Silicon Valley, having dramatically expanded its presence in Santa Clara through developments on office and research sites.
For Vantage, a new Silicon Valley facility would continue a run of significant expansion for the Denver-based operator, which operates 26 campuses around the world. The company added 13 new data centers in 2022, a growing footprint driven by more than $3B in equity and debt financing raised over the course of the year.
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