Business

Company Eyes Atlanta For Its New $500M Data Center Campus

May 30th, 2017

This Wednesday, May 20, 2015 photo shows server banks inside a data center at AEP headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Like most big utilities, AEP’s power plants, substations and other vital equipment are managed by a network that is separated from the company’s business software with layers of authentication, and is not accessible via the Internet. … Continued

John Minchillo / Associated Press

Dallas-based CyrusOne Inc. is said to be considering Atlanta for an up to 1 million-square foot data center campus. According to the ,Atlanta Business Chronicle a project of that size could involve an investment of up to $500 million, industry sources said.

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The expansion would mark the entrant of a major player in the crowded Atlanta data center market and prove there is room for further development.

Data centers, which can be as large as shopping malls, are warehouses stacked floor-to-ceiling with computer servers and other hardware that power websites, crunch data and store information. They are critical to modern business, holding terabytes of sensitive information, and often housed in unmarked buildings.

Demand for data center space in metro Atlanta is up about 20 percent year over year, said Butch Goldi, an executive vice president at Quality Technology Services (QTS), a CyrusOne competitor. Inexpensive power and real estate are major drivers for the data center industry in Metro Atlanta.

If CyrusOne builds out the possible Atlanta campus (likely over several years), it would be the second largest data center operator in the region after QTS, which has nearly 1.4 million square feet across server farms in downtown Atlanta and Suwanee, Ga. CyusOne is said to be eyeing about 60 acres in Lithia Springs, a major data center hub and home to Google’s nearly 2 million-square foot server farm.

Urvaksh Karkaria covers technology for Atlanta Business Chronicle.