NEW CASTLE — Relative newcomer DāSTOR LLC has added a second data center in the Delaware market, due to a growing need for digital storage for health care, manufacturing, education and more.
DāSTOR recently signed a long-term lease for 3 Boulden Circle, which has 60,000 square feet of space, with roughly half used for about 560 data cabinets, holding unimaginable amounts of data for big organizations.
“There’s no way you can put your finger on how much data that represents, because each customer has different applications,” DāSTOR CEO Kevin Mulqueen said. “What’s cool is that the space can support one customer or five. It just all depends on the need.”
Terms of the lease were not disclosed, although Mulqueen noted that his company opts for terms at least 10 years signed. Aerospace company Honeywell just exited its lease at the warehouse in the Boulden Interchange Park, a location it held since 2006.
Launched in 2021, DāSTOR first bought four existing data centers in King of Prussia, Reading Pa., as well as one on 1201 N. Market St. in Wilmington. Pronounced “day-store,” the company was founded as an investment opportunity for Mulqueen, who previously worked 30 years as an executive with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest third-party provider of communications infrastructure.
“We weren’t even on the market for a new location, the broker reached out to me and asked if I wanted to look at it. By our standards, it couldn’t fit the bill to what we were looking for any closer,” he said.
Building a data center at a starting size of 2,400 square feet, and with an average of two hours of data use per square foot, can get expensive, without even accounting for the power bill.
“For us to acquire a purpose-built facility puts us in a field of growth that’s right there, right now,” Mulqueen added. “It already builds off the high fiber network of Interstate 95.”
With the boom of artificial intelligence, there’s more opportunities for companies like DāSTOR. Companies that need private data centers instead of those owned by big companies like Amazon. Law firms that have set up shop in Delaware is a big market DāSTOR is tapping into, as well as hospitals that need to secure data.
“I think that as the [hardware] equipment the companies buy for their needs, especially AI companies, the price tags are not getting smaller. If they use a data center like us, it means they can take advantage of the lack of Delaware sales tax here,” he said.
DāSTOR is still in the market for new acquisitions, mainly with an anchor tenant to feed the business. Right now, Mulqueen said the company is still understanding the space. In the future, DāSTOR will move technicians out to the Boulden Circle site to service customers’ needs. But there’s also an option to remote operate out of its Wilmington location.
“We will be growing and adding tech jobs in New Castle. We haven’t decided what platforms we’re going to run down there for cloud services, but that would also mean we hire engineers,” Mulqueen said.
