Dive Brief:

• Storage and information management services company Iron Mountain has started construction on the first phase of a $430 million, 550,000-square-foot expansion of its existing Phoenix data center.
• The company will build its multi-tenant facility addition in phases according to a five-year schedule on a nine-acre plot of land next to its current data center. The first two phases of construction are expected to be complete in June 2019. According to a plan review application submitted to the City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department, the project will include a new three-story data center and three-story office. Holder Construction Group, which is headquartered in Atlanta and is a leading builder of data centers, is listed as the contractor.
• The company said the new facility will help it meet the increasing demand from large public cloud providers and enterprise customers, all of whom will benefit from the more than 25 carrier and network connectivity providers available to them through the Phoenix Iron Mountain center. 

Dive Insight:

According to a recent Research and Markets report, the global data center construction market was valued at $43.7 billion in 2017 and should expand at a compound annual growth rate of 10% to a value of almost $93 billion by 2025. The North American market is expected to contribute the most revenue, but the Asia-Pacific market is on track to experience the most growth. The report identified Holder Construction as one of the key players in the data center construction market, along with Whiting-Turner Contracting, DPR Construction, Turner Construction and AECOM.

New data centers are under construction or are being planned all around the country, although Ashburn, Virginia, has earned the nickname "data center alley" for the area's high concentration of such projects. Ashburn and other locations in Northern Virginia have become popular data center development spots because of the relatively easy access to the necessary fiber infrastructure, inexpensive power costs and a healthy water supply.

According to Data Center Dynamics, Facebook recently announced that it will build a $750 million data center in Huntsville, Alabama. The company negotiated a $6.6 million package of indirect incentives for the "Project Cricket" data center under the name of Starbelt. Facebook will get $2 million in waived permit fees and $4.6 million of infrastructure work as part of the deal.