Report: Amazon Leases Space in Virginia

Amazon's expanding cloud computing operation apparently needs room to grow. The commercial real estate news site Globe Street reports that Amazon has leased a building in northern Virginia that will be used to expand its data center operations.

Citing an unnamed source, Globe Street says Amazon has leased a 125,000 square foot facility in Sterling, Va. and will invest $60 million in converting the site into a data center. The building, which is owned by a joint venture between Altus Realty Partners and Perseus Realty Partners, features a 90,000 square foot warehouse with 18-foot ceiling clearance that can be converted to data center space. The facility also features about 35,000 square feet of space currently used for offices.

The additional space will help accommodate dramatic growth for Amazon Web Services, the suite of services that allow companies to run their applications on Amazon’s infrastructure and pay based on usage.

Northern Virginia has always been a key market for Internet infrastructure, and that certainly holds true for Amazon. The company operates a major data center in Ashburn, and last year leased space in Manassas for use as a data center.

But the continuing data center expansion in northern Virginia may also reflect Amazon’s ambitions to host cloud applications for the federal government. Earlier this year Amazon began hosting the Recovery.gov web site.

Amazon is known to already operate a major East Coast data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The company has disclosed that it has U.S. data centers in Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark (N.J.), Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis. The company also has international data center operations in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Amazon revealed those locations last year as part of its CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). In early 2010 AWS added a data center in Singapore.

Amazon is also reportedly developing a large data center in Boardman, Oregon near the banks of the Columbia River.