Much of the internet’s traffic runs through data centers in Virginia’s Loudoun County, and one of the largest data center developers in the region has further expanded its big Ashburn campus.
Redwood City, California-based Equinix just opened its 16th data center facility in Ashburn, the second addition to the campus it has made this year.
Equinix said it invested more than $200 million in the Washington, D.C., area in 2020, considered one of the most highly interconnected regions in the world.
Equinix is expanding its Ashburn campus to meet growing demand from government cloud and financial services companies, it said.
It invested $95 million in phase one of its latest data center addition, which also includes a co-innovation facility where vendors can test and demonstrate their products. It invested $111 million in a data center addition that opened this summer.
Equinix said its Ashburn campus is the densest interconnection hub in the United States.
Northern Virginia remains the world’s largest hub for internet traffic, with more new data center capacity coming online in the first half of 2020 than anywhere else in the world.
Commercial real estate firm CBRE reported that Northern Virginia accounted for 70% of the 134.9 megawatts of net absorption among primary markets through June 2020.
There are close to 100 large co-location data centers in Northern Virginia, 80% of which are located in Loudoun County.
