Amazon drops $79M in Pasadena amid data center spending
Amazon purchased a flex industrial space in Pasadena for $78.8 million as it ramps up data center spending, according to property records.
The price was almost 139 percent over what seller El Segundo-based Alvarez & Marsal Capital Real Estate paid a few years ago.
The property, at 2964 Bradley Street, was home to multinational aerospace and defense corporation Thales, though it is unclear whether it is still a tenant. The 168,000-square-foot building sold for roughly $469 per square foot.
It is in Pasadena’s 210-technology corridor, less than 15 minutes away from California Institute of Technology. Neither the buyer nor seller responded to requests for information.
Alvarez & Marsal bought the property from San Francisco-based Graymark Capital for $33 million four years ago. It has an alternative address of 3100 New York Drive and is described as a two-story creative office and industrial building.
Graymark purchased a two-building office campus nearby at 2923 and 2947 Bradley Street for $30 million six years ago. Those two buildings are on the market again, and JLL holds the offering. The building at 2947 Bradley Street is a data center.
It could be that Amazon — via its Amazon Data Services — plans to convert the real estate into a data center, despite talks of an artificial intelligence bubble.
Amazon is betting on data centers. The retail behemoth plans to invest $50 billion in data centers for a single client: the U.S. government; and it plans to spend $15 billion to build data centers in Northern Indiana, having invested double that over the past two decades or so. Plus, the technology giant, founded by the world’s fifth-richest man Jeff Bezos, paid $700 million for a future data center campus in Northern Virginia — a blockbuster land deal.
Pasadena offices have a 23 percent vacancy rate, and all of San Gabriel Valley industrial has a three percent vacancy rate.