Haynes Strader, Vice President of Data Center Solutions, CBRE, sees the market for data center needs flourishing, even during the pandemic.

“It’s been an exciting and crazy 2020, and a challenging one for many of our clients,” Strader said. “From a data center perspective, the COVID-19 crisis created a real sense of urgency for digital transformation for a lot of enterprises, and that’s kick-started a lot of projects in cloud. You have three years of IT planning and planned transformation happening in about three months.”The good news for those markets where data center needs were down in 2019 is that the first quarter of 2020 saw growth, a trend expected to continue next quarter. Some areas, such as Austin, TX, have limited data center capacity due to rapid business expansion and need solutions to meet their data center challenges.

And, while Strader sees concern that some markets could be overplaying their hand in building out future data center capacity, the current growth trends indicate little to suggest these buildouts are unfounded.

“I think the projected growth for this year supports the current market narrative as long as there isn't too much speculative supply built,” he said.