Welcome to third edition of Harper Harrison’s Data Center News wrap-up from our volume two. We know how busy many of the industry leaders are in this thriving sector, so we thought we would highlight some of the month’s industry news into a bite-size format.​ 

3rd Edition - July Wrap Up 

Whilst there have been very small signs of uncertainty across other asset classes such as Commercial and some aspect of Residential, the Data Center market continues to show huge growth and demand across our business and across all regions. 

Across the business we have seen record levels instructions and an increase of 30% compared to Q1. Similar to Q1, site selection across North America witnessed the greatest level of demand closely followed by Design and Construction. 

We continue to hear that rising costs of construction relating to labour and materials remains a concern yet the demand for data continues to rise resulting in the economics of development still stacking up. 

NORTH AMERICAN NEWS

• QTS Realty Trust has announced plans to continue it’s Data Center expansion with projects in Northern Virginia and Denver. Official announcements state that QTS is planning a site up to 240MW at it’s existing site in Richmond. 
• Amazon’s plans to build a giant Data Center of 220,000 sq Ft in Warrenton, North Virginia is coming under increasing pressure from residents. Residents fear the build will impact the value of their housing. This comes as rumours circulate surrounding future zoning changes that could see a limit placed on new Data Center developments. 
• Stack Infrastructure has recently acquired more land in the Hillboro area of Portland as part of the expansion of it’s flagship campus which will take the capacity of the site to 230MW once fully built. 
• Sabey has broken ground on a new Data Center in Round Rock, Texas. The facility will be on a 40 acre site and span 430,000 Sq Ft across two buildings. Launch is set for 2023. 
• NTT has also broken ground on their Northern Virginia’s Ashburn Campus. The site will be 188,000 Sq Ft and is due for completion early 2024. 
• CloudHQ has acquired 100 acres of land in Virginia’s Culpeper County Tech Zone and plans a 2.1m Sq FT campus. 
• FedEx has announced the closure of all of it’s Data Centers and will retire all of it’s mainframes in a move that should save the firm several hundred millions of dollars per annum. 

EUROPE

• Google continues it’s European expansion with the acquisition of 20 Hectares of land in Groningen, Netherlands. The company plan to build a Data Center across 8 hectares to meet rising demand of the use of digital resources and cloud based working. 
• QTS Realty Trust have also been active in the Groningen region with a 9m EURO purchase of land close to it’s existing facility. 
• Merlin Properties have broken ground on their first ever Data Center outside of Bilbao. This is the first of four facilities planned across Madrid, Lisbon and Bilbao. The first 3MW facility is due to launch in 2023. 
• Google has recently purchased 50 Hectares of land adjacent to it’s existing facility in Hamina. It isn’t yet clear as to what the land will be used for exactly but it sits alongside the existing sea cooled facility. 
• Serverfarm is expanding the capacity at it’s LON1 DataCenter in London with an additional 8MW of IT capacity due to customer demand. The 3 storey facility in Feltham covers 130,000Sq ft currently. 

APAC 

• KT Cloud has begun work on a new build Data Center facility in Seoul, South Korea. The facility will feature 10 stories and house more than 100,000 servers and will provide 26MW. 
• AirTrunk has completed it’s 5th and final 40 MW phase in Sydney, Australia. This comes as the final part of a wider 130MW campus. 
• Developer CapitaLand plans to build a 40MW Data Center in Hyrdrabad, India. 
• Equinix and PGIM have announced plans to build their first Data Center in Australia with the opening of their first xScale Data Center based in Sydney. Once fully developed, capacity will total circa 28MW.