New Players Boost Activity in New Jersey Data Center Market

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Trends in Demand

The New Jersey market is made up of mostly larger colocation and single-tenant data center users. Typical requirements in the Northern New Jersey market are above 1 MW, but some companies entering the market will have requirements starting at 100 kW. Industries active in the Northern New Jersey market include financial, healthcare, media, and technology companies.

New Jersey is working its way back from a period in 2011-12 in which multiple service providers built new facilities at the same time, including new market entrants DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), IO Data Centers and Sentinel Data Centers. This led to an oversupply condition in the market for wholesale space.

Despite a general lack of activity in recent years, the New Jersey data center market is starting to see an upswing in interest. Several major players in the industry, like CyrusOne and QTS Data Centers have recently entered the market, with others considering establishing a New Jersey presence. CyrusOne acquired Sentinel’s New Jersey operations in early 2017, while QTS acquired the former DFT facility in Piscataway in 2016 as well as a McGraw-Hill data center near Princeton in 2014.

The area’s proximity to other major markets in the region, as well as the connectivity to international markets in the UK and Canada, has made New Jersey an attractive location for international companies looking to locate in the US.

The Northern New Jersey data center market grew significantly following the economic downturn in 2009, as financial institutions looked to outsource their IT/ data center initiatives to retain capital.

Service providers have been among those filling data center space in New Jersey. In April, cloud infrastructure services provider ProfitBricks announced a five-year lease with Anexio, a tenant at the QTS data center in Piscataway. The company, which is a unit of Germany’s 1&1 Internet, chose to locate in the area due to the projected growth in cloud needs.

The Northern New Jersey data center market grew significantly following the economic downturn in 2009, as financial institutions looked to outsource their IT/data center initiatives to retain capital. A growing financial sector is a positive for the New Jersey data center market, due to its close proximity to Manhattan.

Trends in Supply 

The momentum for data centers slowed in 2013, when the New Jersey market faced an oversupply of space, particularly in the wholesale market. But the past year has seen a renewal of interest, including several providers bringing new supply online.

An interesting example is NJFX, a new player that reflects a trend in which colocation providers are building data centers at the sites where undersea fiber optic cables arrive in North America. NJFX is the largest and most ambitious of those projects. In late 2016 it opened 64,000 square foot Tier III data center built next to a cable landing station in Wall Township operated by Tata Communications. The 10-megawatt facility is about a mile from the ocean.

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In March, 2017, just months after opening the new facility, NJFX announced plans to construct a second two-story data center on 48-acres of land adjacent to their existing facility. The new 80,000 SF data center will add to NJFX’s international connectivity services.

Meanwhile, CyrusOne has the opportunity to expand in Somerset. The former Sentinel New Jersey data center is about 95 percent leased, with the option to add up to 22 megawatts of additional capacity on adjacent land.

The market could soon see other new players. Aligned Data Centers is actively exploring expansion opportunities in major markets, including New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley. Meanwhile RagingWire has expressed a desire to be in the top six U.S. data center markets, which suggests future sites in Chicago, Silicon Valley and New York/New Jersey.

Our New York/New Jersey Data Center Market Report also covers the following topics: 

• Bouncing Back: Leasing Absorbs Space in New York Data Center Market
• Financial Sector Drives Demand in New York Data Center Market
• New Jersey Data Center Market Sees Return to Growth

For more on the New York/New Jersey data center market, we invite you to download the “Data Center Frontier Special Report: The New York/New Jersey Data Center Market,” sponsored by Digital Realty.