Lincoln Rackhouse Buys into Hot Atlanta Data Center Market

Lincoln Rackhouse, the data center division of the commercial real estate firm Lincoln Property Company, has agreed to acquire a property in the Atlanta data center market.

The seller is a corporation that has been using the 5MW facility to host its IT systems. The corporation, whose name Lincoln did not reveal, is planning to lease a portion of the facility after the deal closes, with Lincoln planning to lease the remaining capacity to others. The companies did not disclose the acquisition price in the announcement issued Tuesday.

The Atlanta data center market is heating up, existing players expanding and new ones entering. The demand is driven largely by corporate data center users moving out of on-premises facilities and into colocation data centers, according to a market report by the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. Those users come primarily from banking and financial services, healthcare, telecom, and technology industries.

Digital Realty Trust is expanding its data center capacity in Atlanta; wholesale data center player Ascent recently entered the market via acquisition; Las Vegas-based Switch chose Atlanta as the place for its southeastern-US data center campus; and a report has surfaced saying CyrusOne may be planning a $500 million build in the market.

The biggest player in Atlanta is QTS, which at the end of last year was responsible for almost 75 percent of all wholesale data center capacity in the metro, according to CBRE, another commercial real estate company.

Read more: Atlanta Data Center Market Firing on All Cylinders

Lincoln is also a new entrant to the Atlanta data center market. Its other facilities are in Charlotte, Boston, and Northern Virginia markets, as well as in Richmond, Virginia, and New York State.