DC Blox to be built in Q3 with $200M investment

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Last year, data center DC Blox committed to the largest Greenville County investment in five years when the Atlanta company selected an 8.5-acre Global Business Park property for its next 54,000-square-foot data center.

According to company officials at their Thursday groundbreaking, that means an expected $200 million investment including the construction of six data halls capable of supporting 18 megawatts of power and 7,000 square feet of shared storage and office space built by Brasfield & Gorrie.

“We’re grateful to partner again with DC Blox and CEO Jeff Uphues, who are making a vital investment in the Upstate,” Ben Barfield, Brasfield & Gorrie vice president and division manager, said in a news release from the event. “Brasfield & Gorrie brings significant mission critical expertise to this project, having completed more than $2 billion in mission critical projects companywide. DC Blox’s investment will have a significant impact in the Greenville community, where Brasfield & Gorrie has worked for more than 30 years.”

Completion of the project is expected in the third quarter of this year, along with the addition of five high-paying jobs.

“As we studied the markets in which we felt we could be successful and ones where we felt that there was a lack of digital infrastructure in the quality for which we deliver, Greenville became an obvious choice, but we didn’t know whether it would be the choice for what is now our fifth data center until we viewed the data,” Uphues told GSA Business Report last fall.

DC Blox seeks to fill in gaps in what they call “underserved yet growing markets” across the Southeast, since a number of corporate-use data centers tend to be clustered around the country’s major metropolises like Los Angeles and New York, according to Uphues.

As the need for data centers serving the state of South Carolina and beyond has only intensified since last year’s announcement, DC Blox expects for tenants seeking to make use of the company’s Tier III security to also contribute to the $200 investment in the county, according to the news release.

“With the first Tier III-designed data center now under construction in South Carolina, businesses adopting digital transformation strategies are set to have access to the most reliable and interconnected facility in the state,” Mark Masi, chief operating officer of DC Blox, said in the release. “Whether it’s a prime location, cloud storage, disaster recovery, or an expanded data center footprint, we are proud to bring this state-of-the-art data center campus to South Carolina. Now, even more companies can leverage reliable and efficient data center services and private, high-speed, low-latency network access to cloud providers and applications at scale.”

Once complete, the data center will offer protection for controlled unclassified information and access to DC Blox’s private and redundant carrier-grade mesh-network connectivity linking the company’s portfolio of data centers across the Southeast in Altana; Birmingham, Ala.; Chattanooga, Tenn., and Huntsville, Ala., according to the release.

“We have a backup system for every major system that runs our data center. If the power goes out, we have a backup. If the network connectivity goes out, we have a backup. If the air conditioning system goes out, we have a backup,” Bill Thomason, project management and marketing vice president of DC Blox, said last year.

The company typically provides connectivity, cloud and colocation services — in other words, housing for companies’ servers and computing hardware — for education and research institutions, health care providers, life science companies, banking and finance corporations, government entities, content and cloud-based service providers, among other groups.

Uphues mentioned that the Global Business Park’s proximity to CU-ICAR had piqued the company’s interest in the property when the Greenville Area Development Corp., Greenville Chamber and Mayor Knox White scoured the county for an optimum site.

“DC Blox brings good-paying jobs and significant capital investment to Greenville County, and we are excited to see their vision begin to take shape with this groundbreaking,” Greenville County Council Chairman and Greenville Area Development Corp. board member Willis Meadows, said in the release. “This new data center will help Greenville County accelerate economic growth and build on our reputation as a world-class technology destination.”

Meadows said the company’s investment would be a welcome addition to the county; Uphues hopes the capabilities provided by the center will welcome more investment in digital infrastructure across the state.

“It’s cheaper,” Uphues said of DC Blox’s cloud services in comparison to data centers in Atlanta or Charlotte. “You have access to it, it lowers your operating costs, it’s convenient: all of those things make it where it’s really important to be here in the market.”