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.

Maile Kaiser took some time to sit down with us to discuss the Los Angeles data center market and how the data center industry has changed over time.

Below are some of our takeaways from the discussion.

The growth of the Los Angeles market

While the Los Angeles data center market isn’t one of the largest in the US, it has grown over the past few years.

It’s been viewed as a market for edge data centers and a strategic location for customers who need to have their data close to their end-users. But an increase in innovations in the digital technology industry has caused a rise in the need for edge compute, which is part of the reason for the growth in the market.

The future of The Los Angeles market

Across the data center industry, more companies are going digital than before due to covid - driving the need for more data centers.

These companies are seeing technology advance and want to take the opportunity to mature their digital footprints and connect more with their users.

The Los Angeles market has become an area with more edge growth, and with a population of over 10 million people, Maile predicts that reducing latency will continue to be a critical goal for application providers moving forward.

Data center industry growth

Typically the data center industry has almost been invisible to the wider population. It would work in the background and give access to the applications and tools that everyone uses on a daily basis without anyone knowing that they’re utilizing a data center.

The pandemic seems to have brought more visibility to our industry. Technology stepped in to support people’s everyday needs from work to healthcare to education, with data centers being a massive component to supporting these needs.

Overall COVID-19 has caused more growth and attention on the data center industry and made larger edge markets, like Los Angeles, more important than ever for faster speeds.

Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the data center industry.