365 Data Centers and Aphorio Carter plan 200 MW AI colo pipeline
365 Data Centers has announced a strategic partnership with Aphorio Carter, the critical infrastructure and data centre arm of Carter Funds, to develop approximately 200 megawatts of AI-ready colocation capacity across the United States. The first two priority sites — in Aurora, Colorado, and Simpsonville, Kentucky — are already under letters of intent, with four further sites in Trumbull (Connecticut), Louisville (Kentucky), Harrisonburg (Virginia), and Columbus (Ohio) earmarked for subsequent LOIs.
The combined pipeline spans six facilities that 365 expects to bring online over the next nine to 24 months. Each site is being designed to support cabinet densities ranging from 50 kW to over 200 kW, with liquid-to-chip cooling infrastructure intended to serve high-performance computing and AI inference workloads. 365 will act as long-term operator across the portfolio, while Aphorio Carter brings real estate acquisition, redevelopment experience, and alignment of utility power supply with facility build-out.
The partnership structure
Derek Gillespie, chief executive and chief revenue officer of 365 Data Centers, said the arrangement is designed to "create a new class of high-density infrastructure designed specifically for AI-era workloads." John Regan, president and chief operating officer at Aphorio Carter, highlighted the complementary skill sets: his firm contributing real estate capability and utility power alignment, 365 contributing operational and maintenance track record and an existing enterprise customer pipeline.
Aphorio Carter's parent, Carter Funds, says its team has collectively invested in and managed more than $6 billion of data centre real estate. The partnership does not disclose specific capital commitments, individual site capacity figures, or confirmed customer agreements in this announcement. Availability of space and power remains subject to final contracts and internal approvals, and specifications are described as subject to change.
Market context
The US data centre development market is under acute pressure from AI-driven demand, with hyperscalers, specialist GPU cloud providers, and enterprise buyers all competing for power-ready capacity. Power availability — rather than land or construction materials — has become the primary constraint on new builds, particularly in established markets such as Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. The 365–Aphorio Carter approach of targeting secondary and tertiary markets (Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio) reflects a broader industry trend toward markets with accessible utility capacity and lower land costs, even if latency and connectivity profiles are less favourable than Tier 1 locations.
Liquid cooling adoption is accelerating across the sector as GPU rack densities climb beyond the thermal limits of traditional air-cooled infrastructure. Cabinet densities above 100 kW are now considered table stakes for any facility marketing itself as AI-ready, and vendors that cannot offer chip-level liquid delivery are increasingly excluded from shortlists by hyperscaler and AI-native tenants.
Competitive positioning and regulatory read-across
365 Data Centers competes as a mid-market colocation and managed-services provider against regional peers as well as the major publicly traded REITs — Equinix, Digital Realty, and Iron Mountain Data Centers — that have each announced AI-ready capacity programmes of their own. The six-site portfolio at 200 MW is modest relative to hyperscaler or REIT-scale announcements but is positioned by the company as faster to market than ground-up greenfield development, given the redevelopment angle.
Facilities operating at the power densities described will be subject to increasing scrutiny under state-level energy and water-use disclosure requirements, and any site seeking grid interconnection above certain thresholds may face utility commission review timelines that could affect the nine-to-24-month delivery window. The company has not disclosed which utilities or grid operators are involved at each site. Investors and prospective tenants will be watching for confirmed power agreements and named anchor customers as the clearest signals of commercial progress.