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Data Center Development – City of Vernon & Los Angeles

A San Francisco developer has filed plans to build a 261,000-square-foot data center in the Los Angeles County industrial hub – the City of Vernon.

Prime Data Centers, a wholesale data center developer and operator, has proposed a three-story building on 4.5 acres at 4701 S. Santa Fe Ave., five miles south of Downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported.

The first known data center in the industrial city will replace a 224,600-square-foot garment manufacturing facility built in 1946 and last renovated in 2001, according to Dgtl Infra Real Estate. The property was most recently listed for $30 million.

The new data center is expected to deliver up to 33 megawatts of power to its tenants. The company is also creating a 49.5 megavolt amp substation that will service the new site. Completion is expected in the fourth quarter of next year.

One of Los Angeles’ key strengths is its diverse long-haul fiber and subsea cable connectivity, according to Dgtl Infra. L.A. gives long-haul fiber routes linking Phoenix and Las Vegas access to the West Coast, while serving as a key access point for long-haul fiber routes between Mexico and Canada.

To this end, Prime Data Centers’ Vernon facility will be carrier-neutral and up to five miles away from major interconnection hubs at One Wilshire, 600 W. Seventh St., 530 W. Sixth St., 900 N. Alameda and 818 W. Seventh St. in Downtown Los Angeles, DTLA.

“Los Angeles is a thriving global connectivity market, and our new hyperscale Vernon data center will be right in the middle of it all,” Nicholas Laag, chief executive and founder of Prime Data Centers, said in a statement.

Map of Data Centers in Los Angeles and Southern California.
Map of Data Centers in Downtown Los Angeles.

About Data Centers

The growing reliance on cloud computing and data storage has led to an increased demand for data centers. The two fastest growing segments of the data center space are hyperscalers and edge data centers. Hyperscalers are typically defined as business-critical facilities that are significantly larger than typical data centers and are designed to support robust and scalable applications. These assets are typically owned by companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Meta. A growth forecast from Data Bridge Market Research indicated that the hyperscale data center market will grow at a CAGR of roughly 29.32% between 2023 and 2035.

Edge data centers are located closer to the users and their devices that collect and transmit data, or wherever data is being generated. Generally, these centers work as the go-between between the cloud or centralized regional data centers and IoT (Internet of Things) devices and their associated cellular tower sites. There is an expectation for IoT devices to grow 16% in 2023 to have an estimated 16.7 billion active end points. This would show a CAGR of 26.1% between 2023 and 2030.

These data center facilities are the hub of the new economy and play a fundamental role in our society and digital economy. Their reliability and growth are critical for the continued development of our economy into Web 3.0.

The rapid growth of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fueling demand for data center capacity, already driven higher by the cascade of digital innovations over the past decade such as content streaming, cloud computing, machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), ecommerce and more. While other commercial real estate sectors are experiencing a decline in construction pipelines, data center development has reached an all-time high and will continue to grow to meet demand. 

Contact us to locate potential sites for development.

Draft Zoning Map of DTLA

The above map is a draft version of the Downtown Los Angeles Map of Land Use and Zoning. On the left is the Financial Distict and South Park while on the right is the Warehouse District and Arts District.

The City Planning Commission is updating the Downtown Plan for future growth and changes in land use. The new plan will set a new direction for the future of DTLA to guide the physical development of neighborhoods, and establish goals and policies for land use in addition to a range of planning topics, including streets and open space, urban design, mobility, and arts and culture.

Heavy Industrial zoning would be removed. A new Hybrid Industrial Zone would dominate in the Arts District.

In the upper right section the Cornfield Arroyo Seco Specific Plan (CASP) area encompasses a large area sometimes known as the North Industrial District. Older generations may refer to it as part of Chinatown or Dogtown.

In a June 14, 2021 letter by the Chinatown Stakeholders to the Planning Commission, CASP was addressed per the below excerpt which is somewhat critical.

In the Cornfield – Arroyo Seco Specific Plan (“CASP”) adopted in 2013, City Planning attempted to promote infill development in the CASP area but also sought to limit the percentage of residential space in the floor area of new projects. This had the unintended effect of discouraging new development even at a time when other parts of the Central City were experiencing a development boom. The only project within the CASP area that has been approved since adoption of CASP (1457 N. Main St., with 244 live/work units) moved forward only as a result of the Central Area Planning Commission granting (in May 2020) an exception from CASP’s limitation of residential uses not exceeding 15 percent of the floor area. The City Council subsequently approved Councilmember Cedillo’s motion (Council File No. 13-0078-S2) directing City Planning to review the land use incentives in CASP to determine whether they had the net effect of discouraging the production of mixed-income housing.

In addition to the above commentary, the Shimoda Design Group submitted its criticism of the draft plan as per below excerpt:

The draft plan website states “Several years ago, City Planning set out to create a modern and efficient zoning system for Los Angeles. The proposed approach aims to establish a new Zoning Code that is more responsive to the needs of Los Angeles’s neighborhoods, in addition to being easier to use.”

These are noble goals, but the current draft of the code does not show itself to be more responsive to local needs, nor is it easier to use. We believe that the zoning sections regarding Form, Frontage, Standards & Use and Density are too prescriptive and need to be revised to allow for creativity and diversity in aesthetics and construction. As it stands this document is too granular and contains many contradictions in its prescription. The density and the complexity of the current version will create an administrative nightmare for the city in its implementation and interpretation. Many of the prescriptions for dimensional minimums and maximums are not reflective of real market conditions and place unnecessary limitations on creativity. The code will inadvertently create requirements that will effectively neuter Los Angeles as a competitive and desirable place to invest in. The result will negatively impact the future of Los Angeles.

We strongly believe that the current draft needs further revisions and input from the professional design and development community prior to adoption. The draft analysis of the Downtown, Arts District, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown districts in particular need to be reconsidered and not be defined by transitory cultural associations, a form-based code or by prescribed use requirements that will not evolve over time to reflect the community that it serves. We strongly believe and support the up zoning of all of these areas to increase density and affordability.

The CASP is a land use document that governs a 600-acre industrial area interspersed with clusters of residential neighborhoods, commercial activity, City-owned land, affordable housing developments, and open spaces, such as the Los Angeles State Historic Park (the “Cornfield”). The area contains 3.7 million square feet of industrial space—the most
prevalent use in the CASP—of which 74 percent is used for warehousing, storage, or distribution. There are about 1,800 dwelling units in the CASP, three-quarters of which are in multi-family buildings, totaling about 6,200 residents.