The Atlanta Data Center Market Moves Into High Gear

The Atlanta Data Center market is moving into high gear based upon the numerous large-scale data center announcements over the past few months. Historically, Atlanta has been a steady enterprise, colocation and interconnectivity data center market with moderate growth seeming to have missed some of the recent rapid growth and hyperscale activity seen in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia.

Recent project announcements include:

Switch (NYSE: SWCH) announced The Keep, a new multi-phase 1 million SF data center campus which with an estimated eventual investment of over $2 billion

Facebook to start on a massive $750 million data center campus near Atlanta in Stanton Springs, Georgia with an initial phase of 970,000 SF

CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE) announced its entry into the Atlanta market with a 50 MW data center campus planned for completion in 2019

DataBank partnered with Georgia Tech for a new data center in downtown Atlanta

T5 Data Centers announced plans for a new Atlanta area data center project totaling $100 million of investment and 130,000 SF

These announcements along with other expansion plans in the market by Digital Realty Trust and Zayo will bring several billion dollars of data center investment to the area.

As seen in some other major data center markets in the US, new data center supply has typically driven some of the large hyperscale cloud provider activity including Google, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Oracle, Softlayer and others. The hyperscalers typically lease large swaths of space and power in data center facilities operated by companies such as CyrusOne, Digital Realty, T5 Data Centers, Switch and other quality operators.

Heading into 2019, many of these announced data center projects will be coming to market and we anticipate a number of pre-leasing announcements along the way. We anticipate a very active next 24 months in the Atlanta market.