Infomart Expanding in Tight Silicon Valley Data Center Market

Infomart Data Centers has kicked off an expansion project on its Silicon Valley data center site, expecting to bring an additional 6MW of capacity to a market where demand for data center space significantly outpaces available supply, the company announced this week.

Technology companies have been taking up data center space in Silicon Valley quickly and in big chunks, while wholesale data center providers have taken a more careful, phased approach to expansion, in contrast with past practices. These dynamics have led to supply shortages and growing lease rates in the market.

Some of the biggest data center leases in the Valley last year were signed by Microsoft, Uber, Alibaba, IBM SoftLayer, Google, VMware, Arista, and Amazon, according to the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers.

Read more: Who Leased the Most Data Center Space in 2015

In its annual US data center market report released earlier this year, Jones Lang LaSalle, also a commercial real estate company, estimated demand in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley market exceeded 80MW when the report was published. JLL said it expected rates in the market to continue growing over the course of the year.

Infomart is one of few companies building additional data center capacity in Silicon Valley, where real estate is expensive and land that’s suitable for data center construction is scarce.

The company that’s building more than others is Vantage Data Centers, which has announced two separate expansion projects – a 6MW and a 21MW one – on its Santa Clara campus. Another provider building in Silicon Valley is DuPont Fabros Technology, which is expanding capacity in Santa Clara by 16MW.

Other major players expanding in the market are CoreSite and Equinix.

The first phase of Infomart’s data center in San Jose is about 9MW. The company is now fitting out the second 50,000-square foot building at the site.

This was the original site operated by Fortune Data Centers, which merged with Dallas Infomart in 2014 to create the company that exists today. Infomart also operates data centers in Dallas, Portland, and Ashburn, Virginia.