Meta Platforms sells East Valley land to data center developer
Amid a large investment in the Phoenix metro, EdgeCore Internet Real Estate has acquired nearly 15 acres of land in Mesa.
The previous owner, California-based Meta Platforms Inc. (Nasdaq: META), the parent company of Facebook, sold the land to Denver-based EdgeCore for nearly $1.2 million, according to an affidavit of property value recorded in Maricopa County. The site has an address of 3856 S. Everton Terrace, near the intersection of Ellsworth and Elliot roads in Mesa, according to real estate database Vizzda.
Meta confirmed the sale to the Business Journal via email saying it didn’t need the land and is not working with EdgeCore for future development on the site. A map from Maricopa County Assessor’s Office shows Meta is still the owner of an adjacent parcel to the west of the 15 acres it sold to EdgeCore.
What EdgeCore will do with the land wasn’t known as of Tuesday afternoon. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
In the last four years, EdgeCore built a 180,000-square-foot building in Mesa that offers cloud-connected data center solutions to Fortune 1000 clients as part of a bigger data center campus. The more than $150 million project is located at 13303 S. Ellsworth Road, just to the south of EdgeCore’s newly acquired land.
EdgeCore had planned to eventually support about $2 billion in data center development in the city.
In the summer of 2021 — under the pseudonym Redale LLC — Meta acquired 396 acres in Mesa on the southeast corner of Elliot and Ellsworth Roads for $123.2 million where it said it would build a $800 million data center. The first phase, which includes two buildings, is already under construction.
The company said that it has enough demand to expand the project to five buildings totaling more than 2.5 million square feet and putting the total cost of the data center well above $1 billion. The first building of the project is expected to be delivered in 2023 and the entire project will be finished in 2026, according to previous reporting from the Phoenix Business Journal.
Data center developers and tenants have been attracted to the Phoenix market due to tax incentives, a lack of natural disasters, low latency, lower utility rates, and a stable power grid, according to experts. Research from JLL said that new data center supply will be impeded by the availability of land and power in many major markets, which could drive expansion outside of traditional hubs.
As of June 2022, the Phoenix metro has about 544 existing megawatts of power across 6.3 million square feet of space with only 23.9 megawatts vacant. It was second in the country, behind northern Virginia, with 278 megawatts under development compared to zero megawatts under construction in the first half of 2021, according to previous reporting.