BlackChamber Group Lands $1.2B for Data Center Construction in Northern Virginia
Once completed, the facilities are expected to boast 740 megawatts of capacity
By Nick Trombola January 14, 2025 4:46 pm
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Just when you think investment in Northern Virginia’s data center market has peaked, another billion-dollar venture comes along taking the market to another level.
Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm BlackChamber Group landed $1.2 billion in construction financing from three lenders over the past year to support the development of four hyperscale data centers across the region, Commercial Observer has learned. Once completed, the facilities are expected to house over 740 megawatts of capacity.
“We’re in the middle of a very exciting period for investing in data center development,” Conley Patton, managing partner of BlackChamber, told Commercial Observer in an email. “The market is benefiting from strong demand tailwinds from the growth in cloud computing and AI. Against that backdrop, the pace of growth has run up against standard real estate development challenges, as well as the incremental challenge of sourcing power. This collective dynamic creates opportunities for the data center developers who are able to solve these problems and thereby create solutions for their clients.”
JLL’s Jamie Leachman and Drake Greer advised BlackChamber and helped arrange the financing packages. The loans came from a commercial real estate bank, infrastructure bank and a debt fund with insurance company capital, according to a JLL spokesperson.
Sheer demand for data centers has skyrocketed in recent years, with the U.S.’s data center capacity doubling since 2020 alone. Northern Virginia in particular has become a hotbed of data center investment activity, particularly from tech corporations such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Amazon paid over $560 million throughout 2024 for data center properties in Northern Virginia, with Microsoft hot on its heels with a $465 million payout in March for a single 124-acre site in Prince William County.
“Within the broader data center universe, we believe that Northern Virginia will remain an attractive location for data center development,” Conley added. “NoVA has been the largest data center market in the world for 30 years now, and we believe it will continue to garner high levels of interest from end-users looking to site compute capacity.”
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
