Top 10 Data Center Stories of January 2022

The future is the big theme for January at Data Center Frontier, as our three most popular stories offered insights into technologies and trends that will move the industry forward.

The top story was our annual forecast. The other emerging theme was metaverse technologies and their impact on data center growth and uptime.

Here are the 10 most popular stories on Data Center Frontier in January 2022, in order of article views:

• The Eight Trends That Will Shape the Data Center Industry in 2022: What lies ahead for the data center industry in 2022? We’ve identified 8 themes that will shape the data center business this year. The overarching theme is dealing with the challenges of growth and the data center industry’s vital role in a digital society.
• Data Center of the Future: Equinix Test-Drives New Power, Cooling Solutions: Equinix has created a Co-Innovation Facility (CIF) in Ashburn where it operates liquid-cooled servers supported by fuel cells, sodium-ion batteries and intelligent power management. The facility is part of Equinix’s Data Center of the Future initiative to test-drive new technology.
• The Future is Software Driven and Virtualization is the Path Forward: Software-defined infrastructure is an evolution of virtualization in which the entire IT resource is managed as a single pool. A new DCF special report courtesy of DataBank looks at the future of software-driven IT infrastructure.
• Former AOL Headquarters in Ashburn Will Become a Data Center Campus:: The former America Online campus in Ashburn will be converted into a large data center campus by its new owners, American Real Estate Partners (AREP) and Harrison Street, who are investing $1 billion to expand in Data Center Alley.
• Digital Realty Acquires Teraco as Africa Data Center M&A Continues: Digital Realty will buy control Teraco Data Environments in a transaction that values the South Africa-based developer at $3.5 billion. The deal is the latest in a series of M&A deals for providers in Africa.
• Mega-Deals by Meta, TikTok Boost Data Center Leasing in 2021: Social networks had a big appetite for server space in 2021, as large leases by Meta, TikTok and Twitter made it another blockbuster year for U.S. data center developers, according to a new report from North American Data Centers.
• The Metaverse Will Need A Lot of Data Centers: Whatever form they take, metaverse technologies are bound to be resource-intensive applications. We asked our Roundtable experts to put on their futurist hats and explore what the metaverse might mean for digital infrastructure.
• Metaverse Platform Roblox Adds Data Center to Address 73-Hour Outage: Gaming and metaverse platform Roblox is expanding its infrastructure to address a 73-hour outage in October that left its 50 million daily users offline. The outage highlights the growing focus on infrastructure complexity and uptime.
• New Ashburn Data Center Project Poised to Expand to 4 Million SF: A data center development in Northern Virginia is boosting the size of its campus, and now plans to deploy more than 4 million square feet of server farm space in prime real estate in Data Center Alley.
• DataBank Buying 4 Houston Data Centers From CyrusOne for $670 Million: DataBank has agreed to purchase four data centers in Houston from CyrusOne for $670 million, the company said today. The divestiture of assets comes as CyrusOne prepares for its planned $15 billion acquisition by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners.

Education is part of our mission at Data Center Frontier. In our Voices of the Industry feature, we share the experience of data center executives on the front lines of innovation. Here’s a look at the most popular Voices columns for DCF readers last month:

• State of the European Data Center Market in 2022 (Iron Mountain): Demand for data centers is exploding in Europe and continues to grow. There has been an influx of global capital investment in large markets like Frankfurt and London. Secondary markets are also growing. Eric Boonstra of Iron Mountain Data Centers Europe explores trends and discusses predictions for the European data center market in 2022.
• Edge to Core Networking is Critical for IoT Devices, AI and Automation (Flexential):Workloads are becoming more distributed to support new generation apps and broader use of Machine Learning and AI to help make real-time decisions. Jason Carolan of Flexential explores why networking from the edge to core (and back to the edge) will be critical for IoT, AI, and automation.
• Better Business, Better World: Why Sustainability-Linked Financing Will Influence the Data Center Industry (Aligned): While a sustainability-linked loan can be used for any purpose, the hallmark of this debt instrument is that the borrower’s performance is measured against predetermined sustainability objectives which affect the interest rate, incentivizing improved performance over time. Anubhav Raj, CFO of Aligned, explores how sustainability-linked financing will influence the data center industry in years to come.
• Hybrid Microgrids Help Data Centers Achieve Net-Zero Goals (Enchanted Rock): Many large power consumers, like data centers, have corporate objectives of carbon neutrality, but find themselves having to achieve this through buying carbon credits to offset their carbon output. John Gould, Chief Revenue Officer of Enchanted Rock explores how hybrid microgrids can help data centers, and other large energy users, lead the way when it comes to achieving their net-zero carbon emission goals.

Be sure to check out all of our Voices columns, including insights from Park Place Technologies, Aligned, Data Aire, and Belden.

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