EdgeMicro expands its footprint with five new micro data centers in the U.S.

Edge colocation company EdgeMicro announced on Tuesday that it was building five new micro data centers (MDCs) across the United States. The new sites, which are slated to be online in the fourth quarter of this year, are in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Memphis, Houston, and Pittsburgh.

Denver-based EdgeMicro picked those cities because they are in underserved markets, and due to their large populations as well as input from its client base. The new sites are in addition to EdgeMicro's operational sites in Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Tampa, Florida.

"Success of our initial locations has accelerated our deployment to the edge," said EdgeMicro Founder and CEO Mike Hagan, in a statement. "Our portfolio of eight strategically positioned MDCs offer businesses the chance to connect to users and fully demonstrates our ability to scale in a rapidly growing edge market.

"By offering infrastructure closer to the end user, we lower latency and positively impact the bandwidth challenges that have been created by increasingly important work-from-home demands related to the Covid-19 pandemic."

According to a report by Global Market Insights the edge data center market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.5% between 2019-2025. In addition to content delivery networks (CDNs), service providers and hyperscale cloud providers are moving core components closer to the edge in order to meet the emerging low latency requirements for services and applications such as 5G, IoT, augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles

EdgeMicro, which launched three years ago,  said nationally renowned internet companies and content providers were anchor tenants in its facilities in Austin, Tampa, and Raleigh, with plans to expand their footprints into the new locations.

RELATED: Cloudflare inks agreement with EdgeMicro for edge deployments in 30 markets

In February, EdgeMicro entered into a customer agreement with Cloudflare that puts Cloudflare's cloud services in more than 30 EdgeMicro markets. With the agreement , Cloudflare became an anchor tenant in EdgeMicro's existing Austin, Raleigh, N.C. and Tampa Bay, Fla. facilities, along with the additional 30 U.S. sites.