(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Amazon (www.amazon.com) unveiled this week it has leased a 110,000 square foot property in northern Virginia to expand its data center space, according to a report on Data Center Knowledge.
The announcement follows Digital Realty Trust’s recent acquisition of four contiguous parcels of land totaling 34.2 acres located next to its data center facilities in Ashburn, Virginia.
The additional space will help the company meet the significant growth of the company’s cloud computing storage division, Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com).
With more than 500,000 developers currently using AWS, Amazon’s S3 storage has grown to more than 50 billion files.
Though the Northern Virginia region has developed into a thriving market for Internet infrastructure in recent years, the report speculates that the data center expansion may have something to do with the company’s “ambitions to host cloud applications for the federal government.”
This is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Amazon’s AWS Federal unit offered training sessions last week for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.
At the time, it is still unsure whether Amazon’s equipment purchases qualifies the company for the recently-passed tax incentives for data centers in Virginia.
The state recently introduced a law that gives sales tax breaks for those companies that purchase or lease at least $150 million of data center computer equipment from July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2020.
The data center expansion will help Amazon to manage its rapid growth to provide greater redundancy for customers who are looking to distribute their files across many data centers.
