SpaceX Gets Connected: Satellite Broadband Meets the Data Center
Satellite company Telesat is preparing to deploy its Lightspeed network of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites to provide broadband Internet from space. (Photo: Telesat)
Doug Mohney is the Editor in Chief of Space IT Bridge, which tracks the business of space-based satellites. He has been working in and writing about IT and satellite industries for over 20 years.
SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat and Amazon are all moving forward with plans to deliver low-latency high speed broadband across the globe, leveraging the advantages of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Both SpaceX and OneWeb are filling out their constellations of hundreds and thousands of spacecraft this year, while Telesat and Amazon plan to start launching their first satellites within two to three years.
For NTT Global Data Centers Americas, adding data centers one at a time is not enough. This week NTT Global opens for business in two new markets with launch events in Chicago and Hillsboro, Oregon. By the end of this year, the company plans to open additional new campuses in Santa Clara and Phoenix.
The building boom is the realization of a vision that has been percolating since 2013, when NTT acquired a majority stake in U.S. data center specialist RagingWire. The capital strength of NTT has allowed the company to build a data center platform spanning the major markets in the U.S.
As he announced record earnings powered by his company’s cloud computing business, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella captured the wave of change sweeping the global IT landscape.
“What we are witnessing is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,” Nadella said. “We are building Azure as the world’s computer to support organizations growing cloud needs.”
The extraordinary growth of Microsoft and rival cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services and Google has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As infrastructure developers race to keep pace with cloud demand, business from these “hyperscale” customers is driving record growth for the data center industry.
Data Center Leasing Approached 700 Megawatts in 2020
A look inside a 6 megawatt data hall in the QTS Data Centers campus near Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Rich Miller)
It was a blockbuster year for the data center industry in 2020, as customers leased a record of nearly 700 megawatts of IT capacity from multi-tenant service providers, according to a new report.
That total was more than twice the previous record from 2018, as the COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary demand for data center space as the world shifted to digital operations for work, school and play. The report was the latest in a series of year-end updates on the wholesale data center from North American Data Centers.