A West Coast data center provider is preparing to enter the Northern Virginia market with its largest data center yet.

Vantage Data Centers is planning to build a $1B campus on a 42-acre site it acquired on Ashburn's Data Center Alley, one of the largest clusters of data centers in the world, the Santa Clara-based company announced Tuesday.

The data center campus, expected to break ground in early 2018, is planned to include five buildings totaling more than 1M SF. The company has not announced the exact location of the campus.

With 108 megawatts of capacity, the Ashburn facility will be Vantage's largest to date. The company has a 60 MW campus in Silicon Valley and a 6 MW data center in Quincy, Washington. It is also developing a second Silicon Valley campus with 69 MW of capacity.

The campus will be a significant addition to Ashburn, a corridor that has emerged as a national hub for data centers. The submarket's current data center footprint totals 4.6M SF with 616 MW of total capacity. Ashburn has grown rapidly in recent years, increasing its total capacity by 76% since 2013. Vantage's campus alone would increase the submarket's current capacity by 18%.

“Vantage’s expansion to Northern Virginia is in direct response to demand from our cloud and large technology enterprise customers, who have expansion plans on the East Coast,” Vantage President and CEO Sureel Choksi said in a release.