8CIOReview | | JUNE 2022IN MY OPINIONBy Ali Greenwood, Executive Director, Data Center Advisory, Cushman & WakefieldTHE GREAT SPACE RACE (FOR DATA CENTERS)You've been following the great space race, right? Elon, Richard, Jeff.... the list goes on. Business moguls clambering and exhausting millions (or billions) in resources to get to space and meet what they believe is a unique demand for travel. However, there is another space race taking place in our industry, the GREAT RACE FOR DATA CENTER SPACE. Data is growing exponentially day after day, month after month, and year after year, as we continue to rely on technology more and more in our everyday lives. Even my three-year-old loves her iPad (thankfully just the puzzles app for now.)This last year has created an event greater reliance on technology with the work-from-home movement, telemedicine, FaceTime connections with family, explosive growth in financial trading thanks to online forum Reddit, internet conferencing, virtual schooling, online gaming, the IoT, the list goes on and on. All of this growth is creating increasing demand for data centers. Those big industrial-looking buildings with heavy fencing and robust infrastructure around them.... this is where all those servers live to power everything you do from a technology perspective. A tweet, stored photo, TikTok video, Netflix binge, sending a text or email, it ALL goes a through a data center somewhere.Data centers have seen an explosive growth year-over-year (one could say rocket-like growth), and it looks like there's no end in sight to the insatiable need. When the market was less mature five-plus years ago, it would take an average of more than 18 months to build a data center from purchasing the land to plugging in servers. However, in the last couple of years, the industry has greatly increased its `speed-to-market' construction timeline. In the last 24 months, I would contend the average time to build a data center has compressed to nine to 12 months, and the overall cost to build a data center has decreased approximately 30 percent from five years ago. Ali Greenwood
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