Global developer Thor Equities, after having jumped on the data center bandwagon last year, has named a former Google executive to lead its data center expansion in the Americas.
Raj Vohra, who most recently led Google’s data center acquisitions across the Americas, has joined New York-based Thor as its new executive vice president and head of data centers for the Americas, Thor said in an emailed statement to CoStar News this week.
As Americas’ acquisitions head at Google, he tripled the size of its U.S. acquisitions team, Thor said. He'll be based in the San Francisco area.
Vohra, who began his career at Deloitte Consulting’s real estate and location strategy practice group, also had worked with different multinational Fortune 500 companies during his time at the consulting firm, Thor said.
“Raj has an exceptional track-record,” Melissa Gliatta, Thor's chief operating officer, said in the statement. “He has experienced the incredible growth of the data center sector over the past decade and can skillfully lead us in assembling a strong portfolio of state-of-the-art campuses across the Americas.”
Vohra’s appointment comes as Thor entered the data center sector in 2022 with its first investment in Spain, where the firm is developing the equivalent of a $653 million “Madrid One” data center facility in the country’s capital city.
Thor’s data center ambition comes as the property type is benefiting from artificial intelligence and demand for speed, Joe Sitt, Thor’s chairman, told Fox Business in October.
Heavyweight real estate investor Blackstone Group is also doubling down on data centers, even as it’s cut investment in other property types such as office.
Blackstone’s QTS data center business, for instance, has been driven by “explosive growth in data creation that is being accelerated by the AI revolution,” Jonathan Gray, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer, said in October.