Trends shaping the Data Center Industry in 2022.

An overview of trends that companies in the data center industry need to look out for in 2022.

FREMONT, CA: In 2022 and beyond, the real estate motto on location will be more crucial than ever. It's never been easy to find the ideal location for a data centre campus. However, as cloud builders seek larger chunks of real estate while managing a variety of challenges - climate concerns, scarcity of vital resources like power and water, and increased community interest in the local impact of Internet infrastructure – site selection is becoming a strategic focus.

Climate change is a major concern, as it is disrupting the status quo in both real estate and energy supply. Concerns around water shortages and renewable energy supply will be addressed in some of the most major data centre industries. Environmental considerations will likely influence site selection, benefiting markets with abundant clean energy like Montreal and Hillsboro, Oregon, while posing challenges to markets with tighter resource constraints like water conservation in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, CBRE wrote in its 2022 outlook. The biggest challenge to new development in regions like Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley will continue to be power restrictions.

The data centre industry's number one priority is always uptime. Uptime is growing increasingly complicated as more firms adopt hybrid infrastructure, necessitating backup and failover systems that span cloud, colo, on-premise facilities, and edge technology. In 2021, Internet services were hampered by a series of large cloud reliability events, including a May outage for CDN provider Fastly, an October outage for all Facebook sites, and a major December outage for Amazon Web Services. For the data centre sector, supply chain concerns are quite real. Most operators believe they have not faced substantial project delays because they employ a variety of supply chain risk management measures. However, some industry analysts think that equipment delays and manpower shortages would be more significant in 2022.