Hyperscale data centers come to Flyover Country

The number of hyperscale data centers continues to increase, fueled by the Cloud, a demand for wholesale colocation, and cities that are offering tax investments. Companies that need serious computing power are now thinking about data centers in terms of hundreds of thousands of square feet and thousands of racks. And these massive computer centers are popping up all over Flyover Country.

While regional firms are nibbling at the edges of the mega-data center trend, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are the major players.

In 2018, Google began negotiating a data center in New Albany, Ohio, under the pseudonym Montauk Innovations LLC. It won a tax break worth up to $43.5 million over 40 years. The company broke ground on the center in 2019, and now there are plans for Google to invest $1 billion to expand it.

Google also has a 275-acre data center southwest of Omaha, Nebraska in the town of Papillion. Facebook has a 450,000 square-foot data center in the same town and is already planning on expanding to about 1 million square feet of space.