HawkTalk 52 with Gil Santaliz, CEO at NJFX

The internet doesn’t magically float through the air from continent to continent, it travels via giant cables at the bottom of the ocean. Get an insiders perspective from Gil Santaliz, CEO of NJFX, a cable landing station in Wall, New Jersey You don’t often associate Wall, NJ with Europe and South America - but for NJFX, they’re more connected than you think. Gil Santaliz is CEO of NJFX, a data center and subsea cable facility in Wall, NJ that has access to cable directly connected to multiple points in Europe and South America. We got his take on the data center industry as a whole and specifically in Northern New Jersey in our latest HawkTalk video. If you’re short on time, check out a few of our quick takeaways below. Why cable landing stations are significant to the data center industry Cable landing stations represent the transmission of 99% of global internet traffic. These stations are where the subsea cables land and connect continents. NJFX specifically, located in Wall, New Jersey, is a landing station for 4 cables. These 4 cables, connecting North America to Ireland, Denmark, Norway, The UK, and Brazil. Trends in the Northern New Jersey data center market datacenterHawk has recently seen an uptick in activity, specifically from financial companies in the Northern New Jersey data center market. From Gil’s perspective, the recent changes in the culture due to Covid-19 in New York has made it difficult for people with any interest to get to the data centers in the market. As a result, activity has been spilling into adjacent markets like Northern New Jersey. Future trends in the data center industry In the US, data centers have consistently grown in areas where there are tax incentives attracting data center companies to build. Areas that have not had these types of programs in place have seen the missed opportunities of having data centers built in their regions. However, these same regions have seen a slow increase in property taxes, negating some of the benefits of the original tax incentives. This could cause states and areas with no property taxes, like New Jersey, to attract more data center activity.