Six data center buildings changed hands or got entitled in the lower 48 in the last seven days, and every one of them is small — 3 MW to 55 MW, the band this newsletter exists to cover. Put their trade prices on one line and the range is absurd: $82 a square foot in downtown Oakland, $1,367 a square foot in Bristow, Virginia. Sixteen-and-a-half times, same asset class, same week, same country.

The variable isn't geography, and it isn't power. Oakland has 20 MW of entitled capacity in a building a quarter-mile from a BART station. Bristow is a 2001-vintage box on Linton Hall Road running 43.5 watts per square foot, which is a spec nobody would design today. Bristow has a signed ten-year lease with an investment-grade cloud provider. Oakland has fifteen tours and a broker. That is the whole difference, and this week the market put a number on it.

Below: the Digital Core REIT sponsor sale that priced a lease against a vacancy inside a single transaction, Behring's 81 percent markdown in Oakland, two identical $8.1 million net-lease trades two days apart, the densest small design of the week in Virginia Beach, and a neocloud that stopped renting cabinets and bought 49 percent of the landlord's project company instead.

Bristow at $1,367 a Foot, El Segundo at $769, Same Table, Same Day

Digital Core REIT — the SGX-listed vehicle Digital Realty sponsors and manages — agreed on August 12 to sell interests in three North American assets back to its sponsor for roughly $315.9 million gross, recycling the proceeds into Singapore and Osaka. Two of the three legs are in the lower 48, and between them they do something the tape almost never does cleanly: they price a stabilized lease and an empty building on the same day, against the same counterparty, under the same set of assumptions.

Bristow, Virginia — 8217 Linton Hall Road, 207,000 square feet, single-story, built in 2001, 9 MW — went at a 39 percent interest for $110.4 million. Gross that to 100 percent and the whole asset marks around $283 million: roughly $31.4 million per megawatt and about $1,367 per square foot. The building had just been re-let on a ten-year agreement to an unnamed investment-grade global cloud provider commencing December 1, backfilling a Fortune 50 software tenant that had been in place since 2005.

El Segundo — 200 North Nash Street, 113,606 square feet on four acres, built in 1976, a mile south of LAX — went at a 90 percent interest for $78.6 million. Gross that up and you get about $87.3 million, or ~$769 per square foot. That building has no tenant. Cyxtera's lease ran to 2033 until it was terminated early in the bankruptcy and the Brookfield sale.

Twice the price per foot for a building with a quarter the power density and twenty-five extra years on the clock. The lease is the asset. Everything else is a shell with a substation attached. Unitholder approval is still required and the sponsor is on both sides of the table, so read the mark accordingly — but the relative spread is the useful number, not the absolute one.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Digital Core REIT (seller) to Digital Realty (buyer/sponsor) · Site: 8217 Linton Hall Rd, unincorporated Prince William County, VA — ~4–5 mi SW of Manassas city limits · Footprint: 207 ksf single-story, built 2001 · Load: 9 MW (~43.5 W/sf — the floor of the week) · Lease: 10-yr to unnamed investment-grade global cloud provider, commencing Dec 1; escalator n/d · Deal value: $110.4M for 39%, implying ~$283M / ~$31.4M per MW / ~$1,367 per sf · Source: DCD.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Digital Core REIT (seller) to Digital Realty (buyer/sponsor) · Site: 200 N Nash St, within El Segundo city limits, CA — ~1 mi S of LAX · Footprint: 113.6 ksf two-story on 4 acres, built 1976 · Load: n/d · Lease: none — Cyxtera lease to 2033 terminated early in bankruptcy · Deal value: $78.6M for 90%, implying ~$87.3M / ~$769 per sf · Source: DCD.

Behring Paid $82 a Foot for a Building Berkeley Lab Used to Run Supercomputers In

The Oakland Scientific Facility at 415 20th Street housed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's supercomputing operation for years. Hines bought it from the UC Regents in 2019 for $36 million on an office thesis. Behring Companies bought it from Hines in December 2025 for $6.8 million — an 81 percent markdown — and is now repositioning it as an AI inference facility, uprating the building from 4.5 MW to a 20 MW target with more than 20,000 square feet coming back as raised floor. The reposition surfaced publicly on August 11.

At $6.8 million against 83,000 square feet that is $81.93 per square foot, and against the 20 MW target it works out to roughly $340,000 per megawatt of shell-and-entitlement basis. Nothing in this window is remotely close on either measure. It is the cheapest option on inner-ring capacity anyone bought this year.

Two honest caveats. There is no tenant — Behring is speculative, with tours reported from robotics shops, research labs and cloud providers, and it is not decided between single- and multi-tenant. And the density number depends on how you count. Whole-building, 20 MW across 83,000 square feet is 241 W/sf. Quote it against the 20,000 square feet of raised floor and you get 1,000 W/sf, which is technically true and functionally marketing. Use the whole-building figure. It is the one that comps.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Behring Companies (marketed via Stak Space) · Site: 415 20th St, within Oakland city limits, CA — downtown/Uptown, ~0.2 mi from 19th St BART · Footprint: 83 ksf building, >20 ksf converting to raised floor · Load: 4.5 MW today, 20 MW target (~241 W/sf whole-building at target; 54 W/sf today) · Lease: none — speculative reposition, single- vs multi-tenant undecided · Deal value: $6.8M (Dec 2025, from Hines, who paid $36M in 2019) → $81.93/sf, ~$340k per target MW · Source: DCD.

Two Buildings, $8.1 Million Each, Two Days Apart, Same Seller Naming Convention

A Landmark Dividend affiliate bought the building housing Expedient's data center at 4777 Ironwood Drive in Franklin, Wisconsin on August 11 for $8.1 million. Two days earlier it closed on a T-Mobile-leased data center at 7025 AC Skinner Parkway in Jacksonville, Florida. Also $8.1 million.

The coincidence isn't the price. It's the sellers: both single-purpose entities using the identical RDC-[street number] [street name], LLC convention. That is a net-lease digital-infrastructure vehicle being taken out one asset at a time, and Landmark — a DigitalBridge portfolio company with ADIA holding roughly 40 percent — is the buyer on the other end of it. Expect more of these.

What the pair gives the market is two clean small single-tenant comps: $300 per square foot in Franklin against 27,000 square feet leased to a private operator, and $246 per square foot in Jacksonville against 32,945 square feet leased to investment-grade T-Mobile. The lower price per foot on the better credit is not a pricing error; it is 6,000 more square feet of building. Note also that Jacksonville reportedly traded at $10.5 million in 2022, which makes this a ~23 percent markdown in four years — though DCD has an open query on whether the 2022 buyer was StratCap or Gallatin Point. Don't underwrite off that comp until the chain of title resolves.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Landmark Dividend affiliate (DigitalBridge portfolio co.) from RDC-4777 Ironwood Drive, LLC · Site: 4777 Ironwood Dr, within Franklin city limits, WI (Milwaukee County) — ~13 mi SW of downtown Milwaukee, former Harley-Davidson site · Footprint: 27 ksf · Load: 3.0 MW generator capacity (~111 W/sf on generator, not critical IT — treat as a ceiling) · Lease: occupied by Expedient (private); term and escalator n/d · Deal value: $8.1M → $300/sf, $2.7M per generator MW · Source: BizTimes.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Landmark Dividend from Gallatin Point Capital via RDC-7025 AC Skinner Parkway LLC · Site: 7025 AC Skinner Pkwy, within consolidated Jacksonville/Duval city limits, FL — Southpoint/Deerwood, ~9 mi SE of downtown · Footprint: 32.9 ksf · Load: n/d · Lease: occupied by T-Mobile (investment grade); term and escalator n/d · Deal value: $8.1M → $245.9/sf; reportedly $10.5M in 2022, a ~23% four-year markdown · Source: DCD.

Virginia Beach Sold Nine Acres for $1.8 Million the Same Week It Debated a Moratorium

The Virginia Beach Development Authority agreed to sell nine acres in Corporate Landing Business Park to Globalinx for phase three of its subsea-cable-landing-station and carrier-neutral colocation campus. $1.8 million for the dirt, $65 million all-in, 85,000 square feet, 25 MW, roughly 40 permanent jobs. No anchor tenant disclosed and no timeline shared.

The number that matters: 25 MW across 85,000 square feet is 294 watts per square foot, the densest disclosed design in the window by a comfortable margin and nearly seven times the Bristow box. Cable-landing colo used to be a low-density business — you were selling proximity to the fiber, not the rack. It is now being specced like an inference hall. That is the quiet structural story of the week, and it is worth more to a developer than any of the trade prices above.

The city was weighing a one-year data center moratorium in the same stretch it approved the land sale, which is the current condition of the entitlement market almost everywhere — the door is closing and everyone with a shovel is trying to get through it. At $200,000 per acre and $2.6 million per megawatt all-in, Globalinx got through.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Globalinx (buyer) from Virginia Beach Development Authority (seller) · Site: Corporate Landing Business Park, within Virginia Beach city limits, VA — southern VB near Dam Neck, ~12 mi S of the oceanfront resort strip · Footprint: 85 ksf on 9 acres · Load: 25 MW (~294 W/sf — densest disclosed design of the week) · Lease: land sale, not a lease; no anchor tenant disclosed · Deal value: $1.8M land / $65M project → $200k per acre, $2.6M per MW, $765/sf all-in · Source: DCD.

Axe Compute Didn't Rent the Capacity. It Bought Into the Landlord.

On August 17 Duos Technologies executed five-year hosting service orders with neocloud Axe Compute covering roughly 55 MW of AI facility capacity — facility, not critical IT, and the release is explicit about that — worth more than $500 million in aggregate contractual base payments over the initial terms, with electricity billed separately and excluded. It builds on an existing 10 MW deployment at Duos' Columbus, Georgia campus.

The hosting order is ordinary. The attachment is not. Alongside it the two signed non-binding term sheets for Axe to take a 49 percent minority equity position in the project entities, Duos retaining majority. Duos frames it as non-dilutive project financing. Read it the other way and a distributed-inference operator just decided that renting capacity is a worse trade than owning half the SPV that holds it. If that structure travels — tenant as minority JV partner on the asset it occupies — it changes how every mid-size take-or-pay in this market gets underwritten, because your tenant's credit and your equity partner's credit become the same credit.

Four days earlier Duos signed a separate exclusive term sheet with 0Lat LLC for a structured true lease across all fifteen of its edge sites, 225 cabinets, 90-day mutual exclusivity running to roughly November 11. Term, escalator and pricing are all explicitly unset. That process is where a 15-site edge portfolio finally gets a cap rate, and it is the single thing on this desk's calendar most worth watching.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Duos Technologies Group (Nasdaq: DUOT) project entities · Tenant/co-investor: Axe Compute Inc. (Nasdaq: AGPU) — neocloud credit · Site: "multiple U.S. locations," explicitly undisclosed; builds on 10 MW at Duos' Columbus, GA campus; Duos footprint is TX and GA · Footprint: n/d · Load: ~55 MW facility capacity (density n/d — no sf disclosed) · Lease: 5-yr hosting service orders, reserved capacity, renewal and expansion rights, annual escalators confirmed but rate n/d; billing contingent on RFS testing and written acceptance. Separate non-binding term sheets for Axe to take 49% equity in the project SPVs · Deal value: >$500M base payments over initial 5-yr terms, excluding power → >$1.82M per MW-year on facility capacity · Source: GlobeNewswire.

What to Watch Next Week

The Duos–0Lat exclusivity clock. Ninety days from August 13, so roughly November 11. Confirmatory diligence includes site-level verification of Duos' invested capital, which is an unusual thing to write into a term sheet and tells you what the buyer is worried about. Structure, term and pricing all still to be set.

Hillsboro, Oregon, and the value of an application filed on time. STACK and Aligned both filed land-use applications hours before Hillsboro enacted a 120-day moratorium on August 12; STACK's 4 MW revision survives, Aligned's 36 MW PDX-02 does not. Entitlement scarcity in that submarket just became a pricing lever rather than a nuisance.

Pulaski County, Arkansas, August 25. Full Quorum Court vote on classifying large-scale data centers as heavy industrial requiring a conditional use permit, with 500-foot residential setbacks and noise caps. Watch the setback number — it is becoming the standard ask, and it prices acreage.

Palm Beach County, Florida, August 27. Public hearing and first vote on a temporary halt to large applications, following the 5–1 rejection of the $2 billion Project Tango. That denial was without prejudice, which leaves a door open.

Shawnee County, Kansas, noon on August 28. Compass Datacenters' conditional-use-permit resubmission deadline. The July 24 filing was ruled incomplete on August 4, after which commissioners voted 2–1 for a moratorium running through February 17, 2027. Miss the deadline and the moratorium catches the project.

One number to not get fooled by. The Riot–Anthropic contract straight-lines to $198.52 per kW per month. That is numerically identical to the $198.52 per square foot figure in the build-to-suit tape we ran last week. Different units, pure coincidence, and somebody is going to put them in the same spreadsheet.

Disclaimer: Edge Cases is Barrio Energy's deal-flow product. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation to transact, or a substitute for your own diligence. Specs are sourced from public filings, press, and reporting; verify before you wire anything.