Edged Energy, a subsidiary of infrastructure giant Endeavour, has opened its first North American data center, near downtown Atlanta. The facility is the first of three data centers planned for the site, which will eventually provide 168 MW of capacity.
Dubbed Edged Atlanta, the campus was designed for AI workloads. It uses waterless cooling, which will save an estimated 664 million gallons of water annually compared with a similar data center using conventional water cooling technology.
The first building of the Atlanta campus, measuring 210,000 square feet, provides 27 MW of capacity. Its modular system supports densities of up to 70 kW per rack with air cooling and 200 kW per rack with plug-and-play liquid cooling integration. The second and third data centers at the site, which are still under construction, will have 100 MW and 41 MW of capacity, respectively.
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The campus is on 80 acres at 1800 Thomas St. NW, on part of the former site of a railroad yard that has been unused for many years. Downtown Atlanta is some 5 miles away.
Edged Energy is at work on other data center campuses in the U.S., including facilities in Chicago, Kansas City, Phoenix, Dallas and Columbus, Ohio. The company is also developing or operating data center projects in Europe.
A growing data center market
Atlanta is a growing data center market, with its facilities able to leverage the region’s labor force, power supply and fiber connectivity. More than 1.2 GW of capacity was under construction during the first half of 2024, far outpacing any half-year period on record, according to a CBRE report.
Demand for Atlanta data center capacity has been strong enough in recent years to shrink the market’s vacancy rate. As recently as 2020, vacancies stood at about 15 percent; as of 2024, the rate is roughly half that.
Nationwide, Northern Virginia remains the largest U.S. data center market by far, with 46.5 percent of all the capacity of the eight major markets. Atlanta has grown into one of those markets, and now has 5.5 percent of their total capacity.