Side-stepping the congestion of major data center hubs, AVAIO Capital instead chose to target "step-out geographies" boasting lower-cost land and less competition for power, according to Mark McComiskey, Founding Partner at the infrastructure investment firm.
Here is a clip of McComiskey making his comments:Â
"We're not going to go pay a million dollars an acre for land and compete with everybody else that can pay a million dollars an acre in the five cities that people seem to want to be in," McComiskey explains. "There is no way that this industry can continue to grow focused in just that handful of cities."
This strategy led AVAIO to seek out locations beyond the industry's traditional hotspots of Northern Virginia, Dallas and Atlanta, to name a few. "Our view was that we would go to what seemed like logical step-out geographies," says McComiskey. "And we would find sites, work with landowners before the land was bid up." By securing land and locking in power agreements ahead of anticipated congestion in top-tier data center markets, AVAIO positioned itself for long-term scalability. "We procure power and get that locked in so that when the congestion started to hit, we would be standing there with construction-ready land that had significant amounts of power," McComiskey says.
McComiskey shares his insights in the Cool Vector episode, "How AVAIO Builds Data Centers With 'Just-in-Time' Capital."