CoreSite, a data center firm focusing on major metropolitan areas, launched the first phase of a major development in Los Angeles called LA3.

The development, once complete, will be a 160K SF facility with 18 megawatts of capacity. CoreSite said this week that Phase 1, encompassing 51K SF and 6 MW of capacity, is open for business.

“LA3 expands our footprint in Los Angeles, one of our most high-demand markets, expanding our world-class ecosystem connectivity,” said Brian Warren, CoreSite’s senior vice president of development and product engineering.

The LA3 facility is CoreSite’s third data center in downtown Los Angeles, and sits adjacent to its LA2 site, with fiber routes connecting the three sites.

Overall, CoreSite boasts more than 780K SF of data center space in Los Angeles, and more than 4.6M SF across eight major U.S. markets. It’s also expanding or adding capacity in Chicago and other markets.

On a recent call with shareholders, CoreSite CEO Paul Szurek said that 4.5 MW was pre-leased at the LA3 Phase 1 site, and described the development as part of a long-term strategy to add four newly built facilities fit for enterprise customers.

“The completion of LA3 Phase 1 fulfills our multiyear plan commenced in 2017 to add four ground-up enterprise-class data centers to our portfolio, with the goal of restocking contiguous capacity to strategically support the expansion of our campuses and our existing customers and to bring new customers to join these communities,” Szurek said.

CoreSite has 1,350 total customers, spanning enterprises, network operators, cloud providers and other service providers.