US Roundup: Data Center Providers Expanding from Coast to Coast

RagingWire Launches New Ashburn Campus

RagingWire has launched the first of seven buildings it plans to build on its second data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.

Because it played an outsize role in the internet infrastructure buildout in the 90s, Ashburn has continued to attract more and more data center construction. Companies want to place their servers in the region to have access to the rich network interconnection ecosystem that’s developed there, including networks that connect them with submarine cables that land further north and can take their traffic across the Atlantic, to Europe, or down to South America.

RagingWire’s new facility is massive. Its footprint is 245,000 square feet, which can be supplied with 16MW of power. At full buildout, the 78-acre land parcel will host a campus that will provide 108MW of data center capacity total, across more than 1 million square feet, the company said.

Rendering of RagingWire's planned second data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia

RagingWire is owned by the Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications, functioning effectively as NTT’s primary data center business in the US.

DataBank Expands in Dallas

DataBank announced the launch of its third data center in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, adding 72,000 square feet of raised floor across six data halls in one of the hottest data center markets in the country.

Data center providers like DataBank leased out 36MW of capacity in 2017 in Dallas, making the metro last year’s third most active market, behind Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, according to the commercial real estate firm CBRE. Unlike the two top markets, where much of the demand comes from hyper-scale cloud providers, enterprise users have been the primary demand drivers in Dallas.

DataBank is owned by Digital Bridge, a tech-oriented infrastructure investor that also owns wholesaler Vantage Data Centers, numerous wireless tower businesses, and a wireless network technology company.

Aligned Energy Expands to Salt Lake City

Aligned Energy is renovating a building in West Jordan, just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, to create a 300,000-square foot data center in this small but important data center market.

The company is expanding its geographic reach after launching facilities in the Dallas and Phoenix markets. It’s envisioning a 50MW data center on its 60-acre West Jordan site, expecting to commission the initial 75,000-square foot data hall in the third quarter of this year.

Site Selection Group, a location advisory and real estate services firm, last year highlighted Salt Lake City as an important up-and-coming data center market. There, Aligned will be competing with Flexential (the new name of the combined Peak 10 and ViaWest), DataBank (which acquired the Salt Lake data center provider C7 last year), and to a lesser extent with EdgeConnex, which caters primarily to large content providers and local ISPs in edge markets like this one.

Well-known enterprise end users with data centers in the market include eBay, Twitter, Oracle, and the NSA.