Former Lexmark property on Lexington’s New Circle Road sold to data center developer
What was once a Lexmark data center on Lexington’s New Circle Road will soon expand after it was recently bought by a regional provider of IT hardware and server space.
The $29 million sale of 745 W. New Circle Road closed May 15, according to the Fayette County Property Valuation Administrator, and changed hands to DartPoints Operating Company, a Dallas-based business that operates almost a dozen data centers across the country. DartPoints works to build data center infrastructure and scale it as customer needs grow. Haymaker Company, the commercial real estate agency that represented the seller, announced the sale on social media June 3.
The site adds a “strategically located expansion platform” for the company and is expected to play an important role in its broader growth strategy as it looks to serve larger, more power-intensive customers, DartPoints said in an announcement of the acquisition.
The company will develop the site to support a broad mix of customers and uses, including for the support of different types of artificial intelligence. The site, as is, has an approximately 20 megawatt to 30 megawatt capacity, though DartPoints said there is long-term expansion potential to 70 MW.
Data center capacity is measured in megawatts to indicate the total electrical power a facility can use at its peak. A medium commercial data center uses around 20 MW, whereas a hyperscale data center uses more than 100 MW.
A 20 MW data center consumes approximately the same amount of electricity as 16,500 average U.S. homes annually, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
The future data center campus is intended, DartPoints said, to support up to 200 kilowatts per rack for dense environments. That means each server can use as much as 200 KW, or the same amount of power to continuously run about 200 average U.S. homes at once. With that kind of electricity, the company said there will be air and liquid cooling architecture designed for the campus.
The more than 345,000 square feet of space across nearly 30 acres and two buildings was listed for sale seven months before closing, according to a social media post from Haymaker Company.
One building was partially leased to a variety of tenants, including a call center, a logistics service business and a financial planning office. The other building includes more than 81,600 square feet of former IBM data center space, according to a still available online property listing.
The land was previously used and is already zoned in such a way that permits data center and other technology-related uses.
There is a Kentucky Utilities sub station on site, which was a draw for DartPoints in addition to existing data center infrastructure and room for expansion.
According to the property listing, one of the buildings already has cooling and power management equipment, raised floor systems for cooling and backup generators. The property has more than 600 surface parking spaces, the listing said, advertising that feature as land for future expansion.
In the acquisition announcement, DartPoints CEO Scott Willis said Lexington serves as the right platform for customers looking for sites that can grow with them and support more power.
“Lexington gives us a rare combination of existing infrastructure, a supportive power environment and the ability to scale in a meaningful way,” he said.
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