- When it Comes Data Center Location, Where Do You Build?

AOL started in Northern Virginia with its first data center. As the area grew, the communities invested in technology and network hubs that attracted more tech giants. In fact, Microsoft bought land in the Loudoun area for around 1.4 million per acre just this year, showing that the value of data center land in that area will not be taking a dive anytime soon.

The Pacific Northwest is also a data center hub, with Amazon leading the way along with several other large tech companies. One reason is that water is plentiful in these wet areas and can be harnessed easily for cooling purposes.

That was just the start, of course. Since then, locations have popped up all over the country.

But you can’t just build data centers where you have access to water, and as the Microsoft story illustrates, building near other data centers may be cost prohibitive for many companies. While the Pacific Northwest is also a great location for other reasons, data centers must be built in other places.

Where is the ideal place to build? Well, as with many other things, it depends, but of course the two primary concerns above must be kept in mind. For instance, you could build in the middle of nowhere, where land is cheap, water is plentiful, and there are few weather-related concerns. But if you don’t have a solid connection to the network, your data center will never work.

Likewise, if you were to build a data center near a network hub on the Gulf Coast, you may be at risk from yearly hurricane seasons and other natural disasters that result in either temporary or permanent disruption of services.

But there are other business related factors to consider...

Read the full blog post to read about the other considerations, which include: