As Stream Gets Wired, Amazon Joins the Party in Goodyear

Data center development continues to surge in the Western suburbs of Phoenix. This week Amazon bought land in the growing data center cluster in Goodyear, paying $19.85 million for 91 acres of land.  Meanwhile, Stream Data Centers said its Goodyear campus is connected to the Cox Business fiber network and ready to open next month.

The Amazon purchase adds to the development action in Goodyear. In addition to the Stream project, Microsoft has bought land in Goodyear for a major cloud availability zone, while Compass Datacenters is in active development and STACK Infrastructure and Vantage Data Centers have all bought property in Goodyear for future campuses.

A similar burst of development is underway in the Eastern suburbs of Phoenix, including an existing cloud hub in Chandler and a data center landgrab in Mesa. The Stream underscores the potentially massive cloud growth ahead for the Phoenix data center market, where developers have more than 1 gigawatt of capacity in the works, which is more than any market in the U.S. except for Northern Virginia.

Amazon’s land deal was reported by local media, and builds on its presence in Goodyear, where it already three facilities – an operations center, fulfillment center and delivery station. It’s too early to be certain that the land is for an Amazon Web Services data center campus, but AWS currently has no Availability Zones between Ohio and California. Given the growing critical mass of cloud infrastructure in Phoenix, the region is bound to be on Amazon’s radar for data center site selection.

Building Big in Goodyear

The Phoenix development continues Stream Data Centers’ strategic focus on the hyperscale data center market. Stream says the first of five buildings planned for its Goodyear Campus will go live in August. The agreement with Cox Business will allow tenants to interconnect their Stream services with other data centers or to their local offices using either dark fiber or internet transport services.

“Adding Cox Business to the mix helps us bring world-class connectivity offerings into the Goodyear Campus,” adds Chad Rodriguez, Vice President, Network and Cloud at Stream. “As one of the most robust fiber providers in the West Valley, pulling the Cox Business backbone into our data centers helps us ensure that our customers will have the high performance, low latency connectivity they need to support their businesses.”

“Cox Business has invested more than one billion dollars in Arizona, over the last decade, in expanding its Arizona network to help the Phoenix Metropolitan Area become one of the most connected regions,” notes Ed Aaronson, Vice President of Cox Business. “Data centers are a key component to the economic growth of our community. Our collaboration with Stream Data Centers illustrates the importance of blending data centers and connectivity. This is critical for our local businesses as they compete in a rapidly growing, data-driven economy.”

Stream has bought 157 acres of land in Goodyear, which at full buildout can support up to 2 million square feet of data centers, including room for a new substation from Arizona Public Service Electric Company (APS) that can bring the site’s power capacity of 350 megawatts.