Infrastructure planning report: North America - Denver

The Denver market

Denver is in an excellent strategic location, situated on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, at the convergence of multiple Interstate Highways and fiber routes. This makes it a natural point of interconnection for data and goods in the central United States and attracts transport, logistics and aviation businesses as well as ICT firms and infrastructure.

It is also an extremely reliable data center location, with a low risk of natural disasters. Plus the Mile High City’s altitude gives it a fairly cool climate which allows operators to increase energy efficiency by offering free cooling for most of the year.

Denver is one of the second tier US data center markets. Originally a west coast disaster recovery (DR) backup site, its growth has been driven by home-grown demand from a wide variety of local and regional businesses, with additional investment from several global players.

Economic drivers

The local economy is doing well, feeding this infrastructure growth. With a GDP of nearly US$200 billion, Denver is widely regarded as one of the fastest-growing ‘tech meccas’ in the USA. Lead industries are transport, technology, telecoms, aerospace and agriculture. The financial services sector is also strong - Denver is the largest financial center between Los Angeles and Chicago. And there are a lot of local tech start-ups thanks to regional incubator programs. Denver is a popular central site for core enterprise colocation: Firms that use it for this include Lockheed Martin, Time Warner, Nissan and Honda. And it is a central hub for large tech companies including IBM, HP and Oracle. All of these industries need an increasing amount of data center space.

Record-breaking growth

Driven by this demand, Denver ranked among the top 10 most active U.S. markets for data center leasing in 2021, according to CBRE. The Denver market recorded 8 MW of data center space take-up in 2021, a 299% increase on the previous year. This was a faster growth rate than any of North America’s 17 key data center markets has ever achieved.