Once-Impressive 10MW Data Center Pales to the Commonplace 30MW Lease

No longer a niche investment, data centers are now a cornerstone of the information economy.

SAN FRANCISCO—Once a niche investment and inflexible asset for global enterprises, data centers are now a cornerstone of the information economy. In fact, $100 billion was poured into the asset class during the past decade, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s global Data Center Market Comparison.

This significant capital influx has been matched by an equally major technical shift, as enterprises have chosen to move workloads off premises, first to colocation facilities, and more recently to a mixture of colocation/public and private clouds. This shift has caused the largest cloud platform providers–Amazon, Google and Microsoft–to become the most influential players in many markets, altering data center sizing by a factor of 10. The 10-megawatt data center that was impressive 10 years ago now pales in comparison to 30-megawatt leases now signed with increasing regularity.