Hyperscale, next-gen hyperscale, expansions, APAC, M&A, steady hiring
The past week leading into the Labour Day long weekend again saw a number of noteworthy developments.
Hyperscale cloud growth continues to drive expansion activity and the builds are getting larger and pushing out into places where the requisite land and power is available. The latest project looking to build into the hundreds of MWs involves 1547 and real estate development group Green Fig Land. They are partnering to build a data centre campus in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Large hyperscale builds outside major metros is not without challenges. There was a protest this week in Manassas, Virginia over the noise coming from an AWS data centre. AWS is trying to address the issue with technology, but it is clear that local residents are not always going to welcome data centres with open arms. Meanwhile, real world happenings like war in Europe is causing data centre operators to make contingency plans as they face the possibility of power shortages or unpredictable availability.
Expansion activity continues to push forward. CloudHQ is building large campuses around Chicago and Minneapolis, Digital Realty is building in Dallas, Cologix is investing $150m for an expansion in Columbus, while former Cologix CEO Grant Van Rooyen is reported to be putting a new hyperscale platform together to target builds in places like Wyoming.
Elsewhere in the sector, there was more M&A activity. In APAC, Bridge Data Centres acquired a logistics facility to enter the market in Thailand, while the sell-off of vXchnge’s portfolio looks to be complete.
Finally, there were a number of notable hires across the sector. ClearDATA brought in a former Rackspace executive as its new CEO, CyrusOne hired a new SVP of project development and LOGOS in APAC expanded its data centre practice with three new executive additions.
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