Data Center Land Development

Proactive data center land development enables Stream to build new data centers quickly to meet unprecedented demand and ensure utility capacity to meet massive power requirements. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stream saw the emerging trend of high demand and constrained supply and set about expanding our dedicated site development team—we quadrupled the number of development professionals.

Proactive data center land development mitigates risk and speeds time to market.
When “scale” requirements were under five megawatts, the data center site development process often involved finding and buying sites that were already fully developed, often in existing business parks. These ‘off-the-shelf’ sites were shovel-ready. They didn’t require bringing in high-voltage power lines and building new substations, moving or vacating existing easements or utilities, or mitigating complex environmental risks on greenfield land.

Having developed data centers since 1999, we remember the days when ideal sites—those where pre-development work could be accomplished efficiently and quickly—were relatively easy to come by. That’s no longer the case. In today’s environment, where campus scale requirements are often 500+ megawatts, developing sites that meet the massive size and infrastructure capabilities necessary to serve customer needs is a more complex undertaking.

Proactive land development is a critical component of Stream’s competitive advantage as it drives our ability to develop new data center capacity for our customers on time and without any surprises. It also de-risks our land banking strategy by ensuring sites are shovel-ready and can meet the tight timelines of our tenants. We control a large and growing number of properties across North America—allowing us to meet the disparate needs of sophisticated customers— all of which have been thoroughly vetted to ensure fast development.

Many public and private equity-backed data center providers are restricted on how much land banking they can do given relatively short-term shareholder demands for returns. At Stream, in contrast, because of the way we approach land development we’re able to secure capacity for our customers without overburdening the balance sheet. Working with our capital partners and leveraging our 25 years of successful data center development enables us to source ideal sites, get control of the sites, and then start the entitlement and utility interconnection processes, dramatically decreasing time to market once a customer is ready to contract.

Proactive data center land development ensures that utility power will be available on time.
In many markets, a shortage of available power is an even more challenging constraint than lack of available land, and it’s inhibiting growth of the data center market, according to CBRE. (Not surprising, given that some power utilities are quoting five years to deliver additional capacity and infrastructure such as transformers and breakers.) Because validating utility capacity and managing the deployment of utility infrastructure has become the longest segment of the data center development process, by proactively securing and developing land in key areas (including securing utility power) we’re jumpstarting the development process and dramatically cutting time to market for our customers.

Explore more in our whitepaper Data Center Development in an AI-Driven Market.