A Tract development site outside Reno, Nevada. (Courtesy Tract)
Two years after launching, Denver-based Tract has 20,000 acres of land under contract or its control across the country.
It now also has 20,000 square feet for offices.
“We’ve gotten off to a fast start,” said Graham Williams, the company’s chief investment officer. “Our business lies at the intersection of cloud and AI and energy real estate and infrastructure — and those are hot spaces right now.”
The firm, which purchases and develops potential data center sites, signed a lease last month for its 20,704-square-foot new headquarters across two floors of the Citadel building at 3200 Cherry Creek S. Drive.
Tract has been operating in about 3,000 square feet at 3300 E. 1st Ave., just one-half mile to the north.
“We wanted to make sure we have enough room to grow into and that the space itself would support the way we work, which is collaboration,” Williams said.
Tract specializes in selecting sites suitable for future data center construction, buying the land and bringing in the infrastructure. It then sells the shovel-ready site to firms that construct the actual data centers. The company is still young — so it has yet to complete a project from start to finish — but Williams said the firm owns or is under contract for land across 10 states and takes a “very long-range view.”
“We buy raw land,” Williams said. “We take the land through the zoning and entitlement process … and then we do the horizontal development to bring in roads, water, sewer and fiber.”
The building at 3200 E. Cherry Creek South Drive. (BusinessDen file)
Businessman Grant van Rooyen founded the company in 2022. In an SEC filing last December, the company indicated it had raised over $1.7 billion across 39 investors. Williams said it employs around 50 people and expects to eventually scale up to between 75 and 100 in the new office.
Tract has no ongoing projects in Colorado due to the state’s lack of sales tax exemptions for data center purchases, Williams said. The project that’s furthest along is near Reno, Nevada, where the business has two developments underway that span 3,000 acres. Closer to Colorado, though, is Eagle Mountain, Utah, about one-half hour south of Salt Lake City. There, the firm has a 700-acre project in the works. It also has plans for a development outside Richmond, Virginia.
“We’re working on investing into the infrastructure on these projects,” Williams said. “The first project where we’ve broken ground and have actually started moving dirt and infrastructure is the Reno project. So, I’d say that’s the furthest along.”
But while its work may be outside of town, the brains behind the firm sit in Denver. The company is based here because many of its senior team members have done business in the city for decades.
“The connection to Denver started back in the late ’90s and early 2000s when a number of our current senior team worked together at Level 3 communications, which at that point was literally building the backbone of the internet,” Williams said.
Level 3 was a Broomfield-based telecommunications firm that CenturyLink – now known as Lumen Technologies – later acquired. Tract CEO van Rooyen left Level 3 to found data center firm Cologix in 2010, bringing several team members with him. That business is headquartered downtown at 1601 19th St. and was purchased by Stonepeak, an alternative investment group, in 2017. Five of the nine senior executives at Tract once worked at Cologix.
“This is really a great market to put down roots in again, and so we’re really happy to be working on our third or fourth business here in Denver, depending on which one of us you’re talking to,” Williams said.
A Tract development site outside Reno, Nevada. (Courtesy Tract)
Two years after launching, Denver-based Tract has 20,000 acres of land under contract or its control across the country.
It now also has 20,000 square feet for offices.
“We’ve gotten off to a fast start,” said Graham Williams, the company’s chief investment officer. “Our business lies at the intersection of cloud and AI and energy real estate and infrastructure — and those are hot spaces right now.”
The firm, which purchases and develops potential data center sites, signed a lease last month for its 20,704-square-foot new headquarters across two floors of the Citadel building at 3200 Cherry Creek S. Drive.
Tract has been operating in about 3,000 square feet at 3300 E. 1st Ave., just one-half mile to the north.
“We wanted to make sure we have enough room to grow into and that the space itself would support the way we work, which is collaboration,” Williams said.
Tract specializes in selecting sites suitable for future data center construction, buying the land and bringing in the infrastructure. It then sells the shovel-ready site to firms that construct the actual data centers. The company is still young — so it has yet to complete a project from start to finish — but Williams said the firm owns or is under contract for land across 10 states and takes a “very long-range view.”
“We buy raw land,” Williams said. “We take the land through the zoning and entitlement process … and then we do the horizontal development to bring in roads, water, sewer and fiber.”
The building at 3200 E. Cherry Creek South Drive. (BusinessDen file)
Businessman Grant van Rooyen founded the company in 2022. In an SEC filing last December, the company indicated it had raised over $1.7 billion across 39 investors. Williams said it employs around 50 people and expects to eventually scale up to between 75 and 100 in the new office.
Tract has no ongoing projects in Colorado due to the state’s lack of sales tax exemptions for data center purchases, Williams said. The project that’s furthest along is near Reno, Nevada, where the business has two developments underway that span 3,000 acres. Closer to Colorado, though, is Eagle Mountain, Utah, about one-half hour south of Salt Lake City. There, the firm has a 700-acre project in the works. It also has plans for a development outside Richmond, Virginia.
“We’re working on investing into the infrastructure on these projects,” Williams said. “The first project where we’ve broken ground and have actually started moving dirt and infrastructure is the Reno project. So, I’d say that’s the furthest along.”
But while its work may be outside of town, the brains behind the firm sit in Denver. The company is based here because many of its senior team members have done business in the city for decades.
“The connection to Denver started back in the late ’90s and early 2000s when a number of our current senior team worked together at Level 3 communications, which at that point was literally building the backbone of the internet,” Williams said.
Level 3 was a Broomfield-based telecommunications firm that CenturyLink – now known as Lumen Technologies – later acquired. Tract CEO van Rooyen left Level 3 to found data center firm Cologix in 2010, bringing several team members with him. That business is headquartered downtown at 1601 19th St. and was purchased by Stonepeak, an alternative investment group, in 2017. Five of the nine senior executives at Tract once worked at Cologix.
“This is really a great market to put down roots in again, and so we’re really happy to be working on our third or fourth business here in Denver, depending on which one of us you’re talking to,” Williams said.
