- Data center development is booming and AI is expected to stoke already growing demand.
- Some estimate tech firms will spend $1 trillion on AI in the next five years, mostly on data centers.
- Demand is sapping power grids in major markets and pushing data center development across the US.
On a rolling expanse of rural Ohio land, America’s digital future is being sown.
Last year, a partnership between the real estate investors Lincoln Property Company and Harrison Street purchased 190 acres in New Albany, a small city about 20 miles outside of Columbus where the pair plan to begin construction on a 200-megawatt data center by the end of the year.
The project’s neighbors include Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon – all of whom have similar plans, or are already underway with major data center projects.
“Our regional message is if you’re a major data center developer or customer, we want to talk to you,” said Matt McCollister, an executive vice president at One Columbus, a business development group in the region.
The data center industry has long been clustered in a handful of well-established markets, primarily Northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, Silicon Valley, and Chicago. But the emergence of places like New Albany shows how soaring demand and the sector’s voracious appetite for energy is increasingly pushing data center developers and users throughout the country.
Artificial intelligence, which requires massive computing power and energy loads, is expected to further this migration – especially as utilities in the industry’s core markets have struggled to keep pace with its growth.
Martin Peck, an executive vice president at Lincoln Rackhouse, a subsidiary of Lincoln Property Company that manages its data center development business and operations, said the bustling data center development in New Albany was “a new phenomenon based on power pressures across the northeast and in other established markets.”
“This used to all just be farmland,” Peck said.
Voracious growth has sapped available power
A variety of customers drive demand for data center space.
So-called hyperscalers, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, lease or build their own massive facilities to support sprawling digital operations and major business lines, including cloud-based storage and software applications. Co-location companies sell wattage and rack space to clients that run their own servers. Carrier hotels house the equipment and systems for the fiber optic lines that tether the whole digital ecosystem together.
For decades, the industry has flourished by being closely located and intertwined, allowing a constellation of users, infrastructure, and services to augment one another.
This system serves as the backbone of society’s rapidly growing digital footprint, including records storage, the operation of autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, streaming video, and now, a new generation of proliferating applications powered by AI, such as ChapGPT and Bard.
“There’s a well-publicized arms race happening in AI, and the major tech companies are expected to invest $1 trillion over the next five years in this area, mostly to data centers,” Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, said on an earnings call on July 20. He noted Blackstone’s $10 billion take-private acquisition of QTS Data Centers in 2021.
“It’s showing extraordinary momentum, with more capacity leased in the last two years than in the previous 17,” Gray said of QTS’s pipeline of recent leasing activity.
Amid all the demand, however, power is coming up short.
Dominion Energy, the utility in northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, told builders last year that the grid was struggling to add capacity and that new projects could take years to power up, according to a spokesman. The message came after a torrid period of growth by the data center industry in that region. In the past four years, Dominion has connected 70 data centers in Loudoun County, west of Washington DC, totaling 2,600 mega-watts – enough capacity to electrify 650,000 homes, the spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for APS, the utility in Phoenix, said that it has received requests to connect new data centers whose power requirements are equivalent to “roughly 560,000 Arizona homes over the next eight years.”
“That far exceeds our available generation resource and transmission capacity in the Southwest region during that time frame,” the spokeswoman said.
“Utility power just can’t keep up with the industry,” Pat Lynch, an executive managing director of CBRE’s data center solutions group, said.
A growing list of developers are moving to new markets
Developers have compensated by moving further afield to tap pockets of electricity where it exists on the grid.
Robbie Sovie, an executive vice president who oversees development and construction at T5 Data Centers, said his firm is in contract to purchase 80 acres in Lithia Springs, Georgia, west of Atlanta and roughly 200 acres in a location he declined to specify, “just south” of the city.
The company, which announced a partnership with the Vancouver-based real estate investment firm QuadReal Property Group in 2019 that anticipated $2.5 billion of data center development, will build data centers totaling 200 mega-watts and 300 mega-watts on the sites, respectively, Sovie said. Sovie estimated that the projects would each cost more than $1 billion to erect.
The Atlanta data center market is an established location for the industry, but is smaller than peer markets. It’s now “growing like crazy,” Sovie said, in large part because Georgia Power, the local utility, “is able to source power.”
It’s a similar story in Hutto, Texas, outside of Austin, where Skybox Datacenters and the warehouse and logistics real estate company Prologis, are underway with a 600 mega-watt data center project, one of the country’s largest new data facilities.
Rob Morris, the CEO of Skybox, considers his project’s immense capacity to be among its greatest selling points to customers because it will allow them to scale up their operations flexibly. That kind of growth isn’t always accessible in power-constrained markets.
“Users are now looking for a dependable path to future growth,” Morris said.
Just outside Reno, Nevada, in Storey County, Novva Data Centers announced in May that it would build a 300,000-square-foot project totaling 60 mega-watts. In 2022, Novva raised $355 million from the real estate investment and development firm CIM Group to build “1,000 mega-watts of designed data center capacity by 2027.”
Wes Swenson, Nova’s CEO, said the Reno region was becoming increasingly popular for data center development because of its access to power. The costs of construction and land are also about half as much as more expensive geographies, such as Silicon Valley, he estimated. Swenson said that Novva will spend between $7 million to $8 million per mega-watt raising the location in Storey County and a 300 mega-watt data center it’s developing just outside of Salt Lake City, in West Jordan, Utah.
He said Novva already has plans to construct another 50 mega-watt data center in the Reno area and a 200 mega-watt space outside of Salt Lake City.
“We try to find these niche markets that have low latency to high population centers where we can operate at a lower cost and there is untapped capacity on the grid,” Swenson said.
AI is expected to boost the industry’s migration
Despite the growth of newer markets, the bulk of data center development in recent years has been anchored in the locations where the industry has been traditionally clustered.
As of the second quarter, there was 7,242 mega-watts of planned data center development in these primary markets, according to CBRE, 158% more than at the end of 2020, when pandemic era shifts like increasing online shopping, zoom meetings, and streaming entertainment kicked the industry into overdrive.
In comparison, there is 1,178 mega-watts of development in emerging markets in the US, CBRE said, 69% more than at the end of 2020.
The growth of artificial intelligence could rapidly increase development in these secondary locations, however.
The computer architecture used for AI applications can consume twice the electricity of traditional CPUs, data center experts say. Those vast power requirements are likely to relegate the wave of data center development that is expected to cater to AI to newer areas with surplus electricity.
“Markets that are able to deliver utility capacity at reasonable costs are going to get an outsized share of the new development,” Lynch, the CBRE data center executive, said.
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