Data Centre Essentials

8Economics, Investment, and Procurement of Data Centres

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, data centres became one of the best performers for real estate investors because of the increased demand for Web services.

The underlying need¹ was driven by many factors, including the digital transformation of adopting digital technology to transform services or businesses by replacing non‐digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology requires reliable data centre capacity that can scale quickly and meet demand.

Therefore, the growth of investment in and procurement of data centre assets, both brownfield and greenfield, looks to continue. Data centres are repeatedly deemed² an attractive target for investors looking for a stable and dependable source of recurring revenue, as hyper‐scale operators such as AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft tend to sign up for multi‐year contracts. It is also a scalable investment meaning that once a business footprint has been established, the organic growth of the sector will permit incremental opportunities. The global data volume is forecast to be exponential as (Figure 8.1):

To put this graphic of exponential growth, 1 Zettabyte is approximately 1 billion Terabytes. An average laptop has c. 256 GB of storage, c. 3900 million laptops per Zettabyte. Perhaps a nebulous calculation may illuminate the scale of the computing power in these data centres from a global perspective.

Various ...