Cologix Building $130M Data Center in Growing Columbus Metro

Data center provider Cologix has kicked off construction of a $130 million data center in Columbus, Ohio, which will be the third facility on the company’s campus in the Midwestern business hub.

The company expects to launch the first phase of what it expects will ultimately be a 160,000-square foot, 18MW data center in mid-2017.

Columbus is a good example of secondary US data center markets Cologix has primarily focused on. While it isn’t as big as New York, Northern Virginia, or Silicon Valley, it has a growing population and a robust business ecosystem.

The Denver-based data center provider also has facilities in Dallas, Jacksonville, Minneapolis, New Jersey, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Lakeland, Florida. New Jersey is the latest market it added to its portfolio when it acquired a data center provider called Net Access in October 2015 after raising $225 million in debt to finance expansion.

The company is targeting cloud providers and traditional enterprises with the most recent Columbus build. Its existing data centers in the city already host many network and cloud service providers, whose services other customers can access from the facilities.

The Columbus metro has a strong economy and a quickly growing population. The area crossed the 2 million population mark last year, when it also recorded the fastest wage growth in the nation, which at 6.2 percent surpassed wage growth rate in the San Francisco-Oakland region. A recent study found that startups in Columbus grow their staff faster in their first 10 years than in any other major US metro.

One cloud provider building data centers in Ohio is Amazon Web Services, which last year finalized a plan to invest $1.2 billion to build data centers across three townships in the state. Also last year, Amazon signed a long-term energy purchase agreement with the developer of a future 100MW wind farm in Ohio.