The industry argument has continued; has Atlanta grown past its emerging secondary market stage and become a global primary city? The past two years have seen Atlanta close in on a 300-megawatt market size, with over 130 megawatts of absorption in a mix of current and forward leasing, suggesting that this threshold has finally been achieved! So, what makes Atlanta attractive for the data center industry, and how does this compare with other primary cities across the United States?
The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area has scaled rapidly in several bursts of in-country migration, now encompassing over six million residents in an ever-sprawling suburban landscape. A favorable business environment has assisted with this movement, as the greater Atlanta area is home to a dense concentration of some of the largest companies in the country, spanning sectors such as airlines, retail, food, and an increasingly prolific tech sector. In addition, a dense educational ecosystem supports these firms, with universities such as Georgia Tech and Clark Atlanta providing new talent for businesses large and small. Collectively this creates a strong market for scalable cloud services to manage major enterprises, along with plenty of content streaming opportunities for a large and increasingly wealthy local population.
Fiber, Peering, and Cloud Rich
From a data center perspective, Atlanta is similar in layout to long-established cities such as Chicago or Dallas, with an extremely fiber-rich downtown, offering considerable peering opportunities. Plus, northern suburbs such as Marietta or Alpharetta provide larger sites for corresponding deployments. Many locally based firms owned and operated their data centers in the 1980s or 1990s. This led to a recent gradual sell-off of these facilities as their owners shifted some workloads to the cloud and others to colocation environments. This has led to a considerable tightening of supply throughout greater Atlanta, with market vacancies now less than seven percent, reflecting similar compression in other primary cities across the U.S.
While industrial power is largely available throughout suburban areas of the city, large sites for development are increasingly difficult to come by. Atlanta also enjoys a highly robust industrial warehousing and distribution market, with this sector competing with both the data center industry and the multi-family housing market for well-situated 
parcels. This presents a new wrinkle in a formerly unconstrained area, suggesting that the multi-floor builds and increased rack density seen in other core cities may soon be a more prevalent feature in Atlanta. Despite this, Atlanta offers regional infrastructure, unavailable in many other cities, across the southeastern U.S., providing a home for deployments covering multiple states. As a newly established core market, Atlanta offers plenty of regional fiber, scalable sizing, and a heightened list of cloud service providers for local or primary data center builds. Expect continued scaling in coming years as corporate needs increase, with continued local demand from an ever-growing metropolitan population.
The EdgeConneX campus in Atlanta offers a secure, carrier-neutral environment for all deployments, with excellent access to the downtown core and beyond.
- Tier III design
- Three miles from downtown Atlanta
- Densities available of 20 kW per cabinet
- Three-megawatt expansion going live in the third quarter of 2023
- Additional capacity on request
To learn more, review Atlanta data center details and specifications: https://edge.1.aordev.com/locations/americas/atlanta-ga/
Download the EdgeConneX Atlanta data sheet HERE.
Schedule a virtual tour: https://edge.1.aordev.com/virtual-tours/
To tour our Atlanta campus, please contact: capacity@edgeconnex.com.