CoreSite Brand Guidelines: From CRG West to an American Tower Company

Born in two carrier hotels.

CoreSite is a colocation and interconnection company headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and since December 2021 it has been part of American Tower. Its history begins in 2001 under another name. The company says it started that year as CRG West, a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, created to serve interconnection and data-centre customers at One Wilshire in Los Angeles and at 55 South Market in San Jose. English Wikipedia names the San Jose building as Market Post Tower and calls both sites among the West Coast’s original carrier hotels, buildings where many telecoms networks meet and exchange traffic.

The CoreSite name arrived in 2009. The company says CRG West rebranded that year, choosing a name meant to signal its capabilities, international reach and reliability, and that at the time it ran 11 data centres in seven markets; English Wikipedia dates the change to June 2009. A year later CoreSite listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker COR, the company says, and English Wikipedia dates the listing to September 2010.

Growth came through new markets. English Wikipedia says CoreSite bought properties in Boston and Chicago in 2007, opened a facility in Washington, D.C. in 2005, and entered Denver in April 2012 by buying the local operator Comfluent. The company says it has been headquartered in downtown Denver for more than 20 years and has recently renewed its headquarters lease there.

Interconnection as the product.

CoreSite’s business is renting space, power and connections inside data centres. The company describes its facilities as colocation sites where enterprises of all sizes place the servers and networking equipment they rely on, and it sells cabinets, private cages and private suites, along with remote-hands support and move-in help. Its interconnection products carry registered names: the Open Cloud Exchange, which it calls its software-defined networking platform, and Any2Exchange, its peering exchange. It also lists direct on-ramps to the major cloud providers, among them AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute and Google Cloud Interconnect.

In 2026 the company says it owns and operates 30 data centres in 11 markets across the United States, with a portfolio of more than 4.8 million square feet, and more than 44,000 customer interconnections. Its locations menu groups the sites by region: Los Angeles and Silicon Valley in the West; Chicago and Denver in the centre; Boston and New York in the North-east; Northern Virginia, Raleigh and Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta, Miami and Orlando in the South-east.

The company has a record with internet exchanges. English Wikipedia, citing a Business Wire release of August 2012, says CoreSite that year became the first data-centre operator in North America enabled for AMS-IX, the Amsterdam internet exchange. CoreSite’s own tagline for this side of the business is “How the World Connects,” and it describes its data centres as enabling people, companies and essential services to connect.

The company markets itself to particular industries, listing artificial intelligence, cloud services, media and entertainment, higher education, financial services, healthcare and government among them. Its leadership has changed with its owners: English Wikipedia, citing the Denver Business Journal of July 2016, says chief executive Tom Ray retired that year and was succeeded by Paul Szurek, the board’s lead independent director, and CoreSite’s website now names Juan Font as its president and chief executive and as a senior vice-president of American Tower.

Design and documentation.

Data-centre operators sell something most of their customers will rarely see in person. The product is space, power, cooling and connections inside buildings that are secure by design, so the industry has built a recognisable visual language to stand in for the real thing. Long white halls lined with rows of server racks, often lit in a cool blue, are the most common image on websites, in reports and on trade-show stands.

The second stock image is the campus from the air. Aerial photographs show low, windowless buildings set out in a grid, with car parks, substations and fenced yards around them. Close-ups fill in the detail: banks of cooling towers or chillers on a roof, rows of backup generators, cable trays crowded with fibre and power cords, and engineers in hi-vis vests checking a tablet between the racks. The pictures are meant to suggest scale, order and control rather than any single product.

Names and marks tend to follow the same logic. Many operators use short coined names, initials or plain descriptive words, set in clean sans-serif type, and organise their sites with city or airport codes and numbers. Colour schemes lean on blues, greys and one sharper accent, and campaigns talk about capacity, connectivity and growth in measured, technical language. Because the buildings look alike, the difference is often carried by naming, maps of locations and the way a company describes its customers.

Much of this identity is presented in person at industry gatherings such as Datacloud Global Congress and PTC, where operators, investors and network companies meet. Stands, keynote slides and printed site maps there tend to repeat the same visual cues as the websites: hall photography, campus renders and lists of markets. The guides in this group look at how individual operators use those shared conventions.

From listed company to subsidiary.

CoreSite’s time as a listed company ended in 2021. A Business Wire release dated 28 December 2021, published on CoreSite’s newsroom, says American Tower had closed its acquisition of CoreSite Realty Corporation after a tender offer for all outstanding shares, completing the deal by merging one of its subsidiaries into CoreSite. CoreSite’s own timeline gives November 2021 for the acquisition; Bisnow later grouped the deal with the take-privates of QTS and CyrusOne in the same period. The company now styles itself “CoreSite, An American Tower Company,” and says that in July 2022 the investment firm Stonepeak acquired an ownership interest of about 29% in American Tower’s US data-centre business, raised to about 36% in October 2022.

Its newest Denver building has drawn local opposition. The company says its DE3 facility in north Denver will have about 170,000 square feet and 18 MW of power supplied by Xcel Energy at full build, and that it will be operational in late 2026. In February 2026 El Semanario reported that residents of Globeville, Elyria-Swansea and the 80216 ZIP code had delivered a “Good Neighbor Proposal” to CoreSite on 13 February, asking for a binding, enforceable agreement covering water use and discharge, backup generators, noise and public monitoring.

For a design guide, CoreSite shows how an infrastructure company can carry a renamed brand through a change of owner: the CRG West name gave way to CoreSite in 2009, and the CoreSite name has stayed in front since the American Tower deal. Compare American Tower and Equinix. For this guide we use a deep navy, a mist grey and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CoreSite’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.