Northern Virginia is the first data center market in the world to reach 1 gigawatt of wholesale capacity. The market reached 1.01 gigawatts of existing inventory in Q1 2019, according to CBRE’s latest research. Northern Virginia is the world’s largest data center market by a large margin; London, the world’s second largest data center market, has approximately 559 megawatts (MW) of inventory. 

Last year, Northern Virginia remained the most active data center market, with net absorption of 175.5 MW in 2018. Northern Virginia accounts for two-thirds of the current construction activity in the primary U.S. markets, primarily due to large requirements from cloud users. 

“Explosive growth in cloud computing has created strong demand for data centers in the Northern Virginia region,” says Jamie Jelinek, vice president, Data Center Solutions, CBRE. “It remains the largest and most active data center market globally. A majority of the activity continues to be within a two-mile radius of the Ashburn core and we expect this growth to continue for the foreseeable future.”

With 250.7 MW under construction, and another 316 MW of inventory in the planning stage, Northern Virginia’s pipeline is larger than the existing inventory of any U.S. data center market.