It'll Be a Great Year for Data Centers

JLL managing director Bo Bond tells us corporate relos like Toyota and expansions like State Farm don't just mean more employees, it means more processing power. (By our count, every one employee forwards nine cat videos per day.)

Bo (here with his family) points out that Dallas remains a top five data center market in the US and is on pace to lead the US in absorption in 2014. JLL is tracking about 30 to 50 megawatts of demand in the market; if half of those deals reach fruition, that would eliminate a large majority of the inventory for the next year.

In an average year, DFW absorbs about 20 megawatts of data center space, Bo tells us. As of Q1, the DFW market already absorbed more than 13 megawatts. Data Center developers QTS, Digital Realty Trust, CyrusOne, DataBank, Zayo, T5, Equinix, and ViaWest are all expanding their footprints locally, he says.

Data center providers continue to build spec projects on their campuses or within their current facilities, too, Bo says. Because of the rapid absorption this year, many providers will be delivering space over the next three quarters. Also, look for a couple of new providers to enter the marketplace. (How do you say hello in binary?) Another trend to watch for: data center providers developing from the ground up. Users are broadly adopting colocation, cloud, and managed services versus the older mentality of "I have to build, own, and operate it myself," Bo says.