Data Center Boom 2.0 and the Railroad Analogy

Over at Data Center Journal, facility designer Ron Hughes examines the growing demand for data center services in an article titled The Next Data Center Boom. He's particularly upbeat about the colocation market, which just a couple years back was perceived by many (although not us, of course) as a low-margin, old-school product. "The market for data center services and particularly collocation data center services has changed dramatically in the last two years," Hughes writes, and then goes on to offer a litany of trends that contributing to demand:

I'm reminded of the railroad analogy. In the darkest depths of the data center meltdown, a number of buy-and-hold players noted similarities to the early days of the U.S. railroad industry, in which the early market entrants went broke building the infrastructure, only to have second-generation companies come along, buy the distressed assets cheap, and reap the financial dividends. Were they right?