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“ When Digital Bridge came on board , they liked that strategy , they agreed with it . It was a natural transition that the larger ownership group and dollars behind it allowed us to continue with that plan , but on a much-accelerated schedule , and really take it beyond the Central time zone . So , we still focus on underserved markets and , using a football analogy , American football , underserved NFL cities : Chicago , New York , Northern Virginia , Silicon Valley are very well served , with a great deal of competition . So , we ’ re going after that Salt Lake City , Pittsburgh , Cleveland , Atlanta , that secondary market that has served us very well .”

Martynek is on the same page : “ What we see is that as the internet continues to evolve , that there needs to be infrastructure in secondary markets ; this trend that ’ s called the ‘ edge ’ – our view is the edge is alive and well today . It exists in places

like Pittsburgh and Cleveland and

Salt Lake City and Minneapolis and Kansas City . If you look at DataBank ’ s evolution that ’ s exactly what we ’ ve done . We started in a tier-one market , which is Dallas , and it ’ s still a very important market for us , but all our expansions since then have been into these other markets where we see demand evolving as the internet of everything becomes more important .” The recent announcement that DataBank has partnered Georgia Tech to develop a new 94,000 sqft data center in downtown Atlanta , housing high-performance computing nodes and unique datasets for university research , has certainly piqued the interest of the data center world . Located in Midtown Atlanta , DataBank ’ s ATL1 data center will serve as a HPCC ( High-Performance Computing Center ) and will house the Southern Crossroads providing high speed , high bandwidth connectivity

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