Digital Sees Demand for 5 Million SF of Space

Corporate data center users will require up to 5 million square feet of mission-critical facility space in the next three years, according to Digital Realty Trust (DLR). In a presentation to investors at the JMP Securities Research Conference in San Francisco this morning, Digital Realty CEO Mike Foust said meeting that demand will require new construction.

"There is very little legacy built-out space available," said Foust. "You have to build new space to have the kind of space these corporate users require. There is tremendous pent-up demand. We're seeing demand in excess of supply by about 25 to 20 percent." An audio webcast of the company's presentation is available on the Digital Realty web site.

Foust said there's limited public data available about the supply of data center space, but that Digital tracks supply on a market-by-market basis, and believes demand will continue to exceed supply for some time to come. Foust estimated the demand at between 4 million and 5 million square feet of space between now and 2010.

How does the estimate of 4 to 5 million square feet of demand compare to existing inventory? Digital Realty current owns about 10 million square feet of active data center space in 63 buildings, while IBM says it operates 8 million square feet of data center space, Equinix has a footprint of 2.5 million square feet and 365 Main has just over 1 million square feet.

Digital Realty's projections for demand are based on a number of factors, including surveys of corporate data center users, projections from Gartner and IDC that power and cooling challenges will make a large number of corporate data centers obsolete by 2010, and projections of server sales.

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  By Rich Miller May 21, 2007 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail

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Comments

Posted by: chuck goolsbee at May 21, 2007 01:11 PM