The Cloud Services Boom

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

If it seems like the cloud-services industry is the hottest economic sector in Virginia — outside the new Amazon East Coast half headquarters — that’s probably because cloud services is one of the hottest economic sectors in the United States. This chart published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows how cloud services expenditures have boomed in recent years.

The Washington region was the only metropolitan area in Virginia with the attributes that could compete for Amazon’s HQ2, but other parts of the commonwealth can vie for data centers, as Henrico County has shown with Facebook and Mecklenburg County with Microsoft. Unlike Amazon’s HQ2 facility in Arlington/Alexandria, which envisions hiring 25,000 workers over the next decade or two, data centers require only a few dozen employees, so they can locate in labor markets as small as rural Mecklenburg County.

As long as Virginia has abundant fiber-optic trunk line capacity with connections around the world, like the new trans-Atlantic cables to Virginia Beach, and as long as the state can provide abundant, competitively priced green energy, the sky’s the limit for more cloud-services investment.