In Maryland, Montgomery County officials are taking steps to attract data center business to the region. The county recently announced a new $12 million data center tax incentive plan benefiting those that lease space in ByteGrid’s Silver Spring, Maryland data center.
ByteGrid Maryland Data Center Details
ByteGrid’s Silver Spring data center, known as MDC1, is considered the biggest multi-tenant, secure facility in the Maryland, Baltimore and Washington D.C. region. MDC1 is situated on an 11-acre campus and includes two facilities with a total of 214,000 square feet of data center space and 91,000 square feet of raised floor computer room space. In addition, the structures have more than 20,000 square feet of technical office space.
The Maryland data center was constructed to meet Tier IV fault tolerance and maintainability standards, including 2N utilities, N+2 UPS rotary power, N+2 backup generators, and N+1 mechanical design and N+2 HVAC cooling units. The data center is also carrier neutral, and includes multiple data center fiber optic connections and access to other fiber carriers. Additionally, the facility was designed to be highly secure, maintaining the U.S. Federal Interagency Security Committee’s Level IV standards.
Data Center Tax Incentives
In order to attract clients to the data center as well as to the area in general, Montgomery County officials put together a $12 million incentive package that includes breaks on personal property taxes for a total of 12 years. This is a first-of-its-kind approach to data center tax incentives, which officials hope will help make Montgomery County a more appealing location to technology businesses.
“Given the extraordinary high personal property investment for IT infrastructure by the tenants of these centers, the easiest way for us to level the playing field is to offset some of those infrastructure costs over a 12 year period of time,” said Steve Silverman, Montgomery County economic development director.
While this may seem like quite the discount, the county will still benefit even though they will not receive tax revenue from new ByteGrid tenants. Silverman said that out of every dollar invested by ByteGrid clients, the county will receive 67 cents. At the same time, the county is positioning itself as a hub of data center activity.
