Flexential’s Regional Vice President Bill Cory, is an expert on the Portland data center market and gives us an inside look as to why it’s seen as a hot spot in the industry today.

This is an episode of HawkTalk, datacenterHawk’s series of candid one on one conversations with executives and leaders in the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here.

Here are a few quick takeaways from our conversation.

On HawkTalk 44 David dives into the Portland data center market with Bill Cory, who oversees the western coasts of the US and Canada for Flexential. He currently lives in the Portland area and has been there since 2000. Starting in the telecom industry and transitioning to Flexential (then ViaWest Data Centers) in 2015.

Why data center users find the Portland data center market attractive

With the growth of all the SAAS companies, Portland’s location, being that it’s close to both the bay area and Seattle, played big part in why operators and users have become more attracted to the market. Portland has a much cheaper cost of real estate than what you would find in the bay area or Seattle, without being too far away from either. The government, both at the local and state levels in Oregon, have incentives for data center operators to build facilities, while also offering no sales tax which is a benefit for the users to look at the Portland market.

Portland’s subsea cable access is one of the major benefits of the market

The amount of data creation is increasing more and more which is making the connectivity of data centers just as much of an important factor as the data itself. Oregon has become a diverse access point for subsea cables crossing the pacific with a favorable and easy coastline to build on. These cables not only are adding a new POP (point of presence) but also add resiliency to the west coast of the United States.

What the Portland/Hillsboro market will look like in the coming years

The most recent change in this market has been the increase in large data center facilities. Hyperscale users with larger deployments typically prefer these larger facilities compared to the traditionally smaller facilities that were built years before. There are currently individual facilities planned that are larger than the entire capacity that the Hillsboro market has had for the last 20 years.

We also talked about…

• How COVID-19 had effected the data center industry
• What makes Bill excited to be in the data center industry moving forward