Walsh Canada reaches commercial and financial close on new data centre

Walsh Canada has achieved commercial and financial close on the Enterprise Data Centre Borden Expansion project agreement with Defence Construction Canada and Shared Services Canada. Commercial and financial close signal the fulfillment of the contractual requirements prior to the start of construction. Walsh is serving as the design-builder that forms part of the UIP consortium, comprising Forum Equity Partners Holdings Inc. (equity and co-developer), Balfour Beatty Investments LP (equity and co-developer), Ehvert Engineering Inc. (design lead) and Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions (operations and facilities maintenance).

The Borden Data Centre project is a new multi-phased 120,000 sq.-ft. data centre that consolidates numerous existing facilities into one to dramatically increase performance and operational efficiencies. Features include five megawatts of IT end-state workload capacity, 50,000 sq. ft. of white space, energy-efficient power distribution and cooling systems aimed at achieving a LEED Silver rating, and compliance with Uptime Institute’s 2012 Tier III Data Centre Site Infrastructure Standard for redundancy. Construction is expected to start in summer 2016, with the first of four phases of new the facility scheduled for completion in fall 2017. The overall value of UIP’s Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Maintain solution is $322 million over a 25-year term.