The chief obstruction to data center growth is not the availability of land, infrastructure, or talent. It’s local power, according to commercial real estate services company CBRE
In its 2023 global data center trends report, CBRE says the market is growing steadily and demand is constantly rising, but data center growth has been largely confined to a few select areas, and those areas are running out of power.
No region embodies this more than Northern Virginia, which is the world’s largest data center market with 2,132 megawatts (MW) of total inventory. Its growth happened for a couple of reasons. First, proximity to the US federal government. Second, because there’s a major undersea cable to Europe in Northern Virginia, and data centers want to be as close to it as possible to minimize latency.
