This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities who keep CRE interesting. As a boy in the town of Jefferson, Iowa, the first job Jeff Uphues ever had was with a local electrician, digging trenches for power lines. In a sense, digging trenches for cabling is what Uphues has been doing ever since across a 35-year career in communications infrastructure that, since 2017, has seen him at the helm of Atlanta-based data center developer DC Blox. Since its founding eight years ago, DC Blox has focused primarily on building colocation data centers in small markets across the Southeast in places like Birmingham and Huntsville in Alabama and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The firm also has a significant footprint in the optical fiber business, building and operating networks to send data from smaller Southern markets into Atlanta, as well as developing its own subsea cable landing station in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. With record leasing demand spurring an acceleration of the data center development pipeline in the coming years, the industry is expanding beyond its traditional hubs and attracting new investors. Uphues and DC Blox stand to benefit from that expansion, and the firm is making its first push into a larger market by building a pair of campuses near Atlanta. Uphues spoke to Bisnow about the flood of new data center development in small markets, how artificial intelligence is redrawing the data center map and what CRE professionals dipping their toes into data centers need to know before taking the plunge. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Bisnow: DC Blox has a distinct model within the colocation data center space. You build and operate facilities almost exclusively in small markets in the Southeast, but a significant part of your business is focused on building out optical fiber network infrastructure. How do these two pieces fit together? … Read Full Story | 
