This past Friday, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) raised $640 million in an IPO. DFT is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) which specializes in large-scale commercial data centers. More to the point, they specialize in the sort of facilities which are desired by the largest technology companies. I’ve mentioned before that building and operating facilities is often desirable for larger players, but when it isn’t, they increasingly turn to DFT.

DFT operates quite a few facilities in Northern Virginia. Most familiar to me would be the former AOL Gainesville Technology Center, sold to them in 2005. While this facility was big, the real capacity of a data center is less space (“raised floor square feet”) but power (“megawatts of critical load”). DFT has subsequently acquired several other sites, and will open a new facility roughly twice the size and with four times the power of the former AOL site, with several more in their pipeline.

That’s quite a bit of  new hosting capacity, and a clear sign that the large facility shortage may be over. To put it in perspective, the Lenior, NC or Quincy, WA sites mentioned in my earlier post as “really big” are in the same ballpark, size-wise, as one of their new centers. And, while we don’t really know that Google or Microsoft has filled out their space, DFT brags that all their earlier sites are leased with terms averaging 8 years. Their still-under-construction ACC4 site was 43.8% pre-leased in August.

So, who’s using all that space? Their IPO tells a bit of these normally secretive details. Facebook is making a big new expansion, leasing 10,000 square feet of space. Most of the rest of the space goes to a few major users, according to their registration statement. The same statement indicates that their undeveloped property represents 187MW of additional capacity. That said, they probably want to acquire some new customers, because “As of August 1, 2007, our two largest tentants, Microsoft and Yahoo!, accounted for 86.0% of our annualized rent”.

This is a distinctly different business model than that of either the major network providers (Level3 or Verizon), or the major Carrier Neutral providers (Equinix or Switch & Data). They consider themselves wholesalers to major providers, rather than a retail provider, because they allow the sort of large capacity blocks to be purchased that otherwise can’t be gotten without building it yourself.

So, will they ultimately suffer the fate of Exodus or Genuity?  They do seem to be in the right geographic locations (NoVA, Chicago, Santa Clara). They seem to have the right sizes and scale (new facilities over 30MW), with individual units of capacity in the 2-4MW range, for their target market. I’m not sure there are 10 more Microsoft, Yahoo, or Googles out there looking for space, but if they’re opening up their doors to Facebook at reasonably pricing, perhaps there’s enough large scale demand left. With Amazon chasing the small end, and DFT chasing the high end, this may make a very interesting business outlook for the ever-turbulent retail data center business.