Autonomous cars, Amazon drones to deliver packages, tracking containers during transport, a bracelet for your child to know where it is located, a digital fitting room where your desired clothing is displayed on your body – without putting it on – and so on. The Internet of Things (IoT) will soon connect every appliance, device and gadget in our life to the outside world. All those once futuristic things have one thing in common they will store data “in the Cloud”.

As one of the top data center markets in the world, the Amsterdam area is poised for more growth over the coming years as cloud demand increases. The amount of data going through the cloud will reach 14.1 ZB by 2020, according to the results of the sixth annual Global Cloud Index published by Cisco. In the latest Global Cloud Index, Cisco collected data from all organizations like Gartner, IDC, Juniper Research, Ovum, Synergy, ITU and the United Nations, and combined it with its own networking metrics. According to the results, an estimated 68 percent of cloud workloads will be deployed in public cloud data centers by 2020, up from 49 percent in 2015. If we look at the predictions in the field of IoT, Statista expect that that the Internet of Things devices will grow to 31 billion devices worldwide in 2020, as mentioned in our earlier blogpost. The demand for data per person, our consumption in GB or TB, keeps going up each year.

After Microsoft opened their €2 billion campus, Google opened their data center in North of the Netherlands (Eemshaven)  and the recently the announcement came that Google will expand with a second campus in The Netherlands (Amsterdam region). Other large cloud companies are expanding their supply in and around Amsterdam.

Corporate growth drives data center needs. Companies want to be close to their data and connect directly to public cloud suppliers. Cloud (private, hybid, public) reside where people reside. Increased corporate growth and cloud demands drive more data center development. Datacenter.com opened Datacenter.com AMS1 in Amsterdam South-East this year, the best connected data center Campus, which will soon will upgrade to the second phase due to the fast growth and the high interest. Supply in Amsterdam is constrained, but it will loosen when current suppliers will expand their data center capacity. Thanks to the ‘relatively’ low electricity costs, the central location and great connectivity, the Amsterdam area remains attractive to future data center developments.