The Northeast Science and Technology Center at 2000 Galloping Hill Road in Kenilworth spans 2 million square feet across 107 acres. — Courtesy: Newmark
By Joshua Burd
Onyx Equities and Machine Investment Group have sold a piece of the acclaimed NEST campus in Kenilworth to CoreWeave — the fast-growing cloud provider that is slated to build a data center at the site — in a deal valued at $322 million.
Brokers with Newmark represented the sellers in the transaction at the property — formally known as the Northeast Science and Technology Center — where the joint venture has spent more than two years repositioning the 108-acre, 2-million-square-foot former Merck & Co. headquarters on Galloping Hill Road into a mixed-use research and innovation hub. That includes a 280,000-square-foot lab and manufacturing building that CoreWeave, which specializes in artificial intelligence infrastructure, announced last year that it would lease and invest $1.2 billion to launch its first New Jersey data center, paving the way for its purchase of the facility and 27 acres of adjacent land that it will develop for additional capacity.
The Newmark team was led by Co-Head of Strategic Advisory Andrew Warin and Executive Vice Chairman Josh King, in collaboration with Head of Data Center and Digital Infrastructure Capital Markets Brent Mayo and oversight from Co-Head of U.S. Capital Markets Doug Harmon and Co-Head of Global Debt and Structured Finance Jordan Roeschlaub.
Onyx and Machine Investment Group continue to own and operate the balance of the site and have more than 2 million square feet of space to lease on the campus, the firms said.
“This transaction underscores the accelerating demand for high-powered, well-located sites capable of supporting AI and cloud workloads at scale,” Harmon said. “CoreWeave’s investment in Kenilworth reflects the site’s strategic potential and the market’s appetite for next-generation infrastructure aligned with near-term power delivery.”
The deal comes more than two years after Onyx and Machine Investment Group acquired the property from Merck for $187.5 million, seeking to reposition it while leveraging its trove of high-end laboratories, support facilities and a robust utility infrastructure such as a 50-megawatt substation, cogeneration and chiller plants and a central boiler facility. The nine-building campus is also just off the Garden State Parkway and accessible to the region’s highly educated labor pool.
The firms went on to secure commitments from major tenants such as Revlon and New Jersey Institute of Technology. But it was the October 2024 deal with Roseland-based CoreWeave, which is backed by the chip giant Nvidia and recently went public to great fanfare, that served as a catalyst for its acquisition of what’s known as 11 NEST and further solidifies its expansion plans across the region, according to Newmark.
The acquisition includes the existing 281,000-square-foot, 42-megawatt data center facility known as 11 NEST and the adjacent 27 acres for the eventual ground-up development of an additional 100 megawatts of capacity, the brokerage said.
“This milestone sale builds on our longstanding track record of delivering strategic outcomes for data center investors and developers,” King said. “As AI infrastructure evolves, we’re seeing capital flood into locations where power, entitlement and connectivity converge—and this site checks every box.”
A.I. cloud startup CoreWeave to build $1 billion data center at Onyx’s NEST campus in Kenilworth
