Richard Copeland, CEO, Leaseweb USA, discusses the recent data centre expansion in Miami, New York City and Washington D.C., and offers insights into geo-redundancy, engineering efforts and the trends set to take over North America in the coming years.
Can you elaborate on the key factors driving Leaseweb USA’s decision to expand its data centre presence along the East Coast?
Leaseweb is experiencing rapid growth as we expand our footprint across the US and internationally. Our Miami location is a connectivity hub, offering high-capacity network routes along the East Coast with lower latency and improved redundancy. This strategic location offers exceptional connectivity, making it easy for companies to access key customers in the eastern US and providing top-notch infrastructure for seamless connections to Central and South America.
With the addition of over 115 racks, how does Leaseweb USA plan to manage the increased demand for power and cooling?
With the additional racks, Leaseweb is enhancing its ability to manage increased power and cooling demands by expanding high-density power options, which are critical for supporting more intensive compute requirements such as AI workloads.
The US continues to play a key role in driving growth and expansion in the North American data centre market, particularly in strategic hotspots like Northern Virginia, where it contributes to nearly US$1.2 billion in tax revenue annually. However, the key hubs driving market growth are also creating challenges. In Northern Virginia, for example, the rapid expansion and climate concerns have strained resources, increasing the pressure on both power and data centre providers to innovate. Meanwhile, New York City has a higher density of power requirements, meaning power must be imported or boosted, resulting in higher costs.
Additionally, the surge in AI usage, Digital Transformation, increased adoption of multi-cloud solutions, support for 5G and the rapid expansion of hyperscalers have intensified user demands. Consequently, these factors have constrained power and supply chains, slowing growth and driving up prices.
In response to these challenges, Leaseweb is not only expanding its high-density power options to support the growing needs of intensive workloads but is also utilising a standardised deployment model. Our standardised deployment model ensures that we scale our footprint, power capacity and cooling infrastructure in alignment with required redundancy standards. Leaseweb also closely monitors industry trends and explores innovative cooling solutions to enhance efficiency.
Through these initiatives, Leaseweb remains committed to monitoring power trends closely and exploring innovative cooling solutions to ensure we effectively meet our clients’ evolving needs in this dynamic landscape.
Could you provide more insight into the engineering and design measures that enable the Miami data centre to maintain full operational integrity during extreme weather?
The Miami data centre is well-equipped to maintain operational integrity during extreme weather events thanks to the range of engineering and design measures. It is built to withstand hurricanes, equipped with redundant power systems to handle outages and adheres to comprehensive Disaster Recovery protocols. Leaseweb recognises that our customers have different approaches and strategies for their infrastructure needs. Some prefer to concentrate their resources in a single data centre, allowing us to tailor solutions that optimise price and performance based on their specific business needs.
What advantages will customers see from this expansion, particularly those looking to expand their operations into Central and South America?
Our Miami location provides low-latency, high-performance connectivity to Central and South America, supported by excellent scalability and connectivity options. Partnering with a US-based company and hosting servers in an American data centre further streamlines expansion with existing business partners.
How does Leaseweb USA’s increased focus on customisable geo-redundant services enhance reliability and Business Continuity?
Geo-redundant solutions offer multiple benefits. Typically, the driving benefit is lower-latency access to end-users by having infrastructure ‘close to the eyeballs’, as well as the ability to create redundancy across Leaseweb’s global data centre network. These services enhance resilience and reliability, allowing businesses to maintain operations from a secondary data centre if the primary one goes down.
The advantages of geo-redundancy improve with scale; more data centres contribute to a better end-user experience and greater infrastructure resilience. Even during disruptions, Leaseweb can provide industry-leading SLAs that guarantee Business Continuity.
Traditionally, implementing a geo-redundant setup requires significant overhead from travel and engineering requirements across multiple locations. However, by using Leaseweb services, these overheads are minimised. We provide ample server availability, spare parts and engineering capacities across data centres worldwide, making it easier for customers to benefit from geo-redundant solutions without the associated hassles.
How do you see the IaaS landscape evolving in the coming years concerning data centre innovation?
We are seeing a growing demand for High-Performance Computing, largely driven by advancements in AI along with a strong focus on sustainability, energy efficiency and security. Meeting these needs requires flexible operations that can efficiently manage a wide range of workloads. By leveraging automated processes that optimise IaaS platforms, we offer our customers the adaptability and variation they need to scale their infrastructure.
There is a clear trend toward optimising power consumption and achieving the best price-performance ratio within an environment. Leaseweb’s Cloud solutions are increasingly energy-efficient by aligning usage requirements with resource consumption, eliminating idle equipment in data centres. Bare metal dedicated servers and cloud solutions play a pivotal role in this approach, enabling a hybrid mix of technologies within a single network. This flexibility not only simplifies power and cost optimisation but also ensures that our services can adapt to evolving requirements.
What trends or challenges do you expect will influence data centre operations in North America in the next year or so?
As workloads continue to increase, we can anticipate challenges related to sustainability, power and cooling capabilities in data centres. The growing demand for AI workloads will lead to higher power consumption resulting in elevated operational costs. Additionally, regulatory requirements will compel data centre operators to source a portion of their power sustainably, necessitating significant investments in renewable energy.
To address these challenges, organisations should prioritise data centres with high energy efficiency and strategically locate them in cooler climates where natural cooling can be utilised. This approach not only reduces energy consumption but also significantly lowers costs.
