3Q 2020 Data Center Market Overview

In Podcast 35, David and Mike take a dive into the 3Q trends and analysis based on their thoughts and predictions they made at the beginning of the quarter. This is an episode of HawkPodcast, datacenterHawk’s viewpoints on the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here. You can also click here if you want to read our 3Q 2020 data center overview for North America and Europe. 3Q has wrapped up, you can read more about it on our 3Q 2020 data center market overview. Below are our biggest takeaways and the points we discuss in the podcast above. The biggest takeaway from the last quarter We think this will be a record-setting year for the data center industry even with the challenges that have come with the pandemic. We saw demand spread across all of the primary US markets in the third quarter. Looking back at the second quarter, the Northern Virginia market was responsible for about 70% of the US demand and in third quarter that demand dropped to around 50% of the total US market demand. We saw markets like Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and others contribute more to the total demand in 3Q. What surprised us in the third quarter In the early 2010’s there was a lot of demand specifically from the financial industry in the Northern New Jersey market. Since that time there hasn’t been that amount of large demand in the market. Then in the first and second quarters of 2020 we saw a lot of those financial companies that had large demand in the past wanting to mature their footprint and bring that demand back into the market. We expected this demand to continue in the third quarter, but instead there was a bit of a pause. This pause could be attributed to the possibility of the state legislature levying taxes on financial trades, which may cause companies to consider moving their IT infrastructure to a more tax-friendly market such as Chicago or Dallas. Looking forward to next quarter At the end of 2020, we will likely be wrapping up the largest demand year ever in the US. What’s more remarkable about that is understanding what took place in 2020 and how the world was turned upside down. So for the data center space to be recording its largest year ever is truly a feat to acknowledge. When looking back at the fourth quarter in 2019, we saw a lighter amount of demand than the previous quarters in 2019. We’re on the side of believing that 4Q 2020 will not follow this trend, but instead be a strong demand quarter to close out the year. Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkPodcasts and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.