What is the top U.S. market for data center growth? Look no further than Seattle-Portland. According to a new JLL Data Center Outlook report on the top 10 U.S markets for data centers, Seattle-Portland had 352,000 square feet of data centers under construction last year.
Trailing Seattle-Portland is Chicago with 345,595 square feet, followed by Silicon Valley (236,000) and Northern Virginia (203,000). Other markets that are seeing strong data center construction growth are Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas-Reno, Austin-San Antonio and Atlanta.
Data center growth is being driven by two key trends: enterprises migrating into the cloud, and content owners expanding their arsenal of services for consumers. JLL said that data centers are now key economic drivers for U.S. metro areas, with many states like Michigan offering tax incentives for providers to construct facilities. Switch will break ground on a $5 billion data center in Grand Rapids, Mich., after new state laws were passed that exempt its colocated clients -- and about 40 other Michigan data centers -- from paying sales or use taxes on servers, computers and other equipment for 20 years. ConstructionDIVE article