A data center owned by Cogent Communications is up for sale in Hawaii.
Via Crexi, Hawaii Commercial Real Estate is listing 96-1402 Waihona Place in Pearl City, O‘ahu island, as available. The site is a former Sprint facility Cogent acquired from T-Mobile in 2022.
Sat on 2.5 acres, the 10,320 sq ft (958 sqm), 800kW facility is available for $8 million. Hawaiian Tel, Lumen, and Spectrum are carriers available on-site.
The move-in-ready building is reportedly engineered to withstand hurricane-force winds and other natural hazards. Cogent said additional power availability has been verified with utility provider, Hawaiian Electric Company.
The site is next door to an AT&T facility.
T-Mobile sold its Wireline business to Cogent for just $1 in September 2022. Much of the business sold was Sprint‘s legacy US long-haul fiber network, which T-Mobile had acquired as part of its $26 billion merger with Sprint in 2020.
Cogent’s acquisition included hundreds of technical buildings and switch sites previously used for Sprint’s wireline business, and Cogent has since set about converting the largest 52 into colocation data centers. It has also converted 55 smaller sites into Edge facilities.
The new facilities are set to add more than 1.9 million sq ft (176,515 sqm) of floor space and 177MW of capacity to Cogent’s existing colocation business – which previously totaled around 55 largely-leased colocation facilities and 77MW of capacity.
After tearing out legacy telecoms equipment, the company aims to occupy a small area at the site for its own network needs, and offer around 1MW and 10,000 sq ft (930 sqm) of retail space at each location – with the remaining space and power originally set to lay idle unless needed for more retail.
However, the company has since pivoted and is now actively looking to offer the remaining capacity at each site on a wholesale basis.
The company has told DCD it is willing to either sell the sites and lease back what it needs for its own network and colo operations, or lease the sites to wholesale customers.
CEO Dave Schaeffer has previously said 23 of the 48 total sites that the firm is converting to data centers have been deemed suitable for wholesale monetization, totaling 88MW out of the 169MW. All 23 facilities are set to be fully take-over ready by the end of Q2.
Six other facilities have publicly hit the market so far, spanning Orlando, Florida; Fort Worth, Texas; Elkridge, Maryland; Akron, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; and Atlanta, Georgia.
Facility sizes range from 38,650 sq ft (3,590 sqm) up to 110,740 sq ft (10,300 sqm), offering from 5MW to 14MW. The fiber company currently offers colocation services from each location.
The terms on those six sites are flexible; Cogent says the sites are available to purchase, master lease, or on a wholesale colocation basis.
To buy, the prices range from $44.1 million up to $140 million, and total more than $495m for all six.
Cogent is also decommissioning some legacy Cogent leased data center facilities that are redundant with its fee simple-owned Sprint facilities. A former Cogent facility in Herndon, Virginia, was recently put up for sale, but it's unclear when the company exited the site.
DCD sat down with Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer to discuss the company’s repurposing of legacy Sprint switch sites in the newest issue of DCD>Magazine. Download for free today.
