Infrastructure planning report: North America - greater New York

The greater New York market

Greater New York is one of the world’s biggest business hubs. It is a global center for finance, healthcare, media and technology with a Gross Metropolitan Product of $2.1 trillion (2022) that makes it the largest metropolitan economy in the world. If it was a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world.

As such it is unsurprising that Greater New York is also one of North America’s primary data center markets, with over 1800 MW of data center capacity spread across a diverse set of facilities. As demand continues to rise, data center providers are building out rapidly, with construction activity hitting a 10-year high of 67 MW in H1 2022.

Key sectors

According to JLL Research, financial services alone have a pipeline of requirements that will quickly exceed current built capacity. The volume requirement from the financial services sector is hardly surprising, considering that it accounts for almost 40% of the city’s economic output.

A phenomenal 68 Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in and around New York. Tied to growing demand from transforming sectors, the appetite of hyperscale cloud providers for facilities in the region is at an all-time high. Steady demand plus the recent increase in larger deals for space-hungry cloud providers has reduced space availability in existing facilities.

Geography

Most customers research the entire region before selecting either central Manhattan or outlying regions such as New Jersey. Each state offers distinct characteristics in terms of inventory, power costs and incentives. For TCO reasons, there is considerably more colocation space available in outlying areas.

In Manhattan the majority of providers are in retrofitted high-rise towers. Colocating in Manhattan comes with a much higher price tag for both real estate and power, but it is also very connectivity-rich, and for many service providers and blue chips the central location is seen as a necessity. For many others, however, New Jersey is regarded as the preferred option, with easy access, excellent connectivity, more available space and lower TCO. Most data center development in New Jersey is in either the I-95 Corridor in Northern New Jersey (Weehawken, Jersey City, Carlstadt, Secaucus, Clifton, and Newark) or to the southwest in Central New Jersey on Route I-287 New data center concentrations are also emerging, for instance around Orangeburg in Rockland County, about 25 miles north of Manhattan.