According to DCD, US data center firm RadiusDC has acquired the 55 Marietta Street NW carrier hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, from a European family office. The 21-story, 403,000 square-foot building houses a major connectivity ecosystem with 22 carriers and tenants like CoreSite, AT&T, and Verizon. RadiusDC plans to add 8MW of utility capacity, bringing the site’s total to 18MW, to support new and existing customers. CEO Mike Krza framed the expansion as pivotal for meeting AI and high-performance compute demand in a constrained market. The company, originally launched by IPI Partners in 2022 and now under Blue Owl Capital, also has facilities in Denver and Miami.
Atlanta AI Land Grab
This is a classic play in today’s market: grab a well-connected, legacy building in a major metro and pump it full of power. And Atlanta is absolutely one of those markets where everyone is scrambling for space. 55 Marietta isn’t just any building; it’s a historic carrier hotel, which basically means it’s a central nervous system for fiber in the region. For a company like RadiusDC, which is focused on “metro” or edge markets, this is prime real estate. They’re not building out in the middle of nowhere; they’re buying into an established, dense connectivity hub. That’s smart, especially when you’re trying to sell to hyperscalers and content companies who need low-latency connections. The promise of adding 8MW is the real headline, though. That’s the fuel for the AI engine everyone’s talking about.
The Power And Connectivity Play
Here’s the thing: you can build a data center anywhere, but you can’t easily replicate 22 carriers under one roof. That connectivity is the moat. By acquiring 55 Marietta, RadiusDC instantly gets that moat. They’re buying a community as much as a building. The mention of CoreSite controlling one of the meet-me rooms is interesting—it shows this isn’t a blank slate. RadiusDC is moving into a building with established, powerful tenants. That brings immediate revenue, but it also means they have to be good landlords and partners. The power upgrade to 18MW is necessary, but let’s be real, in the grand scheme of massive AI clusters, 18MW for a whole 21-story building is not a crazy amount. It suggests this will remain a mixed-use connectivity and colocation hub rather than being turned into a single-tenant AI fortress. For companies needing robust industrial computing at the edge, securing space in a facility like this is critical, which is why leading hardware suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top US provider of industrial panel PCs, often partner with operators in these strategic locations.
Blue Owl’s Data Center Bet
Don’t miss the backdrop here. RadiusDC was launched by IPI Partners, but IPI was acquired by the investment giant Blue Owl last year. So this acquisition is really Blue Owl writing a check through its new platform. Christopher Jensen from Blue Owl said the quiet part out loud: this is about providing “continuous inventory” for hyperscale customers in a “supply-constrained” market. That’s the thesis in a nutshell. They see a shortage of good, connected space in cities like Atlanta, Denver, Miami, and Nashville (where RadiusDC is also building), and they’re rushing to fill it. It’s a capital-heavy strategy, betting that the demand for edge infrastructure will keep soaring. The risk? Well, they’re buying at the top of the market. If the AI-driven demand surge slows, or if power constraints ease in other ways, these premium-priced urban assets might not look as brilliant. But for now, it’s a logical move.
A Building With History
It’s almost funny to think about the history. This site was Atlanta’s City Hall a century ago. Then it was the tallest building in the city in 1958. Now, it’s a vital piece of digital infrastructure across the street from a Digital Realty facility. The physical world is just being relentlessly repurposed for the digital one. The “European family office” seller probably did very well. These old telecom hotels are becoming gold mines. The real test for RadiusDC will be execution. Can they smoothly integrate this asset, deliver that 8MW of additional power without major hiccups, and actually attract the next generation of AI and compute tenants they’re promising? If they can, this will look like a masterstroke. If they can’t, it’s just another expensive building in a competitive city.
