North Carolina’s Emerging Data Center Cluster
<p>Jonathan Morgan is a School of Government faculty member.</p> <p>As a new year begins, economic developers and public officials in North Carolina must feel pretty good about the state’s prospects in 2011 for building on its recent success in attracting several major data center facilities. In a few short years, North Carolina has emerged as a major contender for these types of facilities.For example, according to one consultant, the Greensboro region may be the second best location in the world for data centers, behind Iceland but ahead of Shanghai, Latvia, and Mumbai. In the western part of the state the region known as the “Highway 321 Data Corridor” is gaining prominence and seeing a boon in data center activity. To capitalize on this opportunity, five counties—Alexander, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba, and Iredell—have formed a multi-jurisdictional initiative to ensure that new projects consider locating in “North Carolina’s Data Center Corridor”.</p> <p>As technology companies prepare and position themselves to support new ways of processing and using data via the Internet, demand for suitable data center locations is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. Cloud computing as a way to run and access extensive web-based applications stored on remote servers, in particular, is a major trend that will fuel these types of projects. By one estimate, the market for cloud computing services will grow from $16.2 billion in 2008 to $42 billion in 2012.</p> <p>Let’s briefly recap some of the recent data center projects in North Carolina in order to highlight the potential economic development impacts of these facilities:</p> Google opened [...]
