Company
About Cordgrass Data
We were founded in 2013 by an electrical engineer and a coastal engineer who had spent Hurricane Sandy watching the region’s networks fail for want of dry switchgear and diesel. Cordgrass is the salt-marsh grass of the Meadowlands. It grows where it floods.
01 Today
Today
We own and run two data centers, SEC1 in Secaucus and NWK1 beside Port Newark, with 22.8 MW of critical IT capacity between them and room for about 290 customers. We employ 74 people, 52 of them on the two sites, around the clock.
The company is owned by its founders and employees (58%) and by a long-term infrastructure fund that invested in 2021 (42%). Its board has seven members: the two founders, two members appointed by the fund, our chief financial officer, and two independent directors, one of whom chairs it.
We have no plans to build a third site outside New Jersey. We are often asked.
02 History
History
- 2012Hurricane Sandy. Our founders spend the last week of October keeping generators running in a lower Manhattan carrier hotel, carrying diesel up stairwells in five-gallon cans.
- 2013Cordgrass Data is founded in a rented room in Secaucus to build data centers that are designed around the flood line.
- 2014We buy a 1973 refrigerated warehouse on Sedgebank Road and start building a new floor inside it.
- 2015SEC1 opens in April with two halls and eleven customers.
- 2016First SOC 2 Type II report.
- 2017Hall 3 opens at SEC1.
- 2018We buy a 9.4-acre site beside Port Newark.
- 2019Piling begins at NWK1. Our public status page starts in November.
- 2020NWK1 opens in June, three months late.
- 2021A long-term infrastructure fund takes a minority stake. Both sites ride out Ida.
- 2022We raise our design flood elevation to 18.5 feet and start the Raise program.
- 2023Hall 4, the first Dry Floor, opens at SEC1.
- 2024The SEC1 perimeter barrier is complete.
- 2025A generator fire at SEC1 in June. We publish the full report and change how we test, after hearing from our neighbors.
- 2026Renewable diesel at both sites. Level 2 at NWK1 opens with eight Dry Floor suites.
03 How we work
How we work
- Numbers first. Every claim we make about a building comes with the figure behind it and the date it was measured.
- Incidents are public. If something we run affects more than one customer, it goes on the status page, and serious ones get a full written report.
- Neighbors count. We are a large, loud building on a street where people live.
- Engineers answer the telephone. Customers with a technical question are put through to someone who can answer it.