The Wall Street Journal
Google Inc. searched for land for its data centers and got lucky in Iowa, a state better known for cornfields than computers.
The Mountain View, Calif., company is investing an additional $200 million in a $300 million Iowa data center under construction in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The move will bring Google’s total investment in the Hawkeye state to more than $1 billion since 2007.
The Iowa project is one of the largest and latest in a fast-growing commercial-real-estate niche of data centers, buildings that contain computer servers and other technology that process the mounting needs of Internet users.
“A couple of decades ago these megaprojects were in the auto industry,” said John Boyd, president of Boyd Co., a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J. “The mega holy grail projects today are within the data-center space.”