CoreSite has quietly bulked up its Silicon Valley footprint, snapping up three South Bay tech buildings in Santa Clara for about $100 million. The deal pulls a cluster of older office and R&D properties into arm's reach of CoreSite's existing Santa Clara data center campus and could speed up a long-foreshadowed push to convert at least one parcel into high-density compute space.
According to The Mercury News, a CoreSite affiliate bought 2805 Bowers Ave., 2855 Bowers Ave., and 2710 Walsh Ave. for roughly $100,000,000. That price works out to about 26.6% more than the approximately $79 million GI Partners paid for the same Walsh-Bowers assemblage in 2021, a jump detailed by DatacenterDynamics.
What the parcels include
One of the sites, 2805 Bowers Avenue, has already been through the local planning grinder. The property is tied to a long-running proposal to demolish the existing office building and replace it with a four-story, roughly 244,068 square foot data center that would include an on-site electrical substation. That concept is laid out in City of Santa Clara planning documents and in filings with the California Energy Commission, which also detail a backup generation plan and mitigation measures tied to the buildout.
How the sites reached the market
GI Partners originally stitched the Walsh-Bowers properties together in early 2021 as part of a fund targeting essential-tech and life-science real estate. The firm then advanced a 72 MW data center proposal for 2805 Bowers, and industry coverage notes GI Partners paid roughly $79 million for the combined parcels in 2021. The plan sparked debate at the Santa Clara planning commission before securing approvals in 2024, according to DatacenterDynamics.
Why CoreSite might want these lots
CoreSite already runs a dense interconnection campus in Santa Clara and has been stacking multi-story infill facilities on and around that site to handle low-latency, high-density workloads, including AI. The company describes its data centers as colocation hubs where enterprises park servers and networking gear so they can communicate, store data and process it closer to end users, per CoreSite. Market watchers say infill parcels in this pocket of Santa Clara are getting pricier as operators jockey for scarce power and proximity, a trend tracked by DatacenterHawk.
What is next
Any move to convert or rebuild the newly acquired sites into fresh data center capacity would still need more permits, environmental review and heavy upgrades to local electrical infrastructure. Those requirements are spelled out in City of Santa Clara planning materials and in related California Energy Commission filings, as summarized by the City of Santa Clara. For now, the properties have simply changed hands. If CoreSite decides to pull the trigger on redevelopment, watchers can expect a flurry of new permit applications and environmental notices to surface in local and state planning records.
