< Previous46 JULY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO N in the Nordics and across northern Europe. WorldStream, a hosting provider, in June announced a 268-rack expansion at its company- owned, flagship data center in Naaldwijk, the Netherlands, part of the municipality of Westland, southwest of The Hague in the province of South Holland. “This second- phase expansion means that WorldStream, within the course of a year, will be doubling its facility capacity to 536 data center racks at this location,” said the company. WorldStream’s two data centers in Naaldwijk currently hold up to 15,000 dedicated servers in total. The expansion means growing that capacity to 20,000, “but WorldStream is already eying another greenfield data center build nearby,” said the company. In Amsterdam, Switch Datacenter Group recently transferred its AMS1 data center and operations to global giant Equinix for $34 million, as Switch (not to be confused with the Nevada-based data center operator Switch), strengthens its focus on the colocation wholesale market and customer-specific site development for enterprises and hyperscale customers. The company runs two more high-end data centers in the Amsterdam metro area and is actively involved in the planning of more wholesale data centers to come. As for Equinix, “Amsterdam is a key interconnection point for Europe, with leading enterprises and cloud service providers making it a primary hub for IT infrastructure,” said Eugene Bergen, president, EMEA at Equinix. “The Netherlands and especially the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area is a top destination for global businesses looking to expand into Europe,” added Peter van Burgel, CEO, AMS-IX. “There is access to a highly educated and multilingual workforce and a state-of-the art technology infrastructure to meet the digital needs of these businesses.” In Vantaa, Finland, part of the Helskinki metro area, Ficolo is investing more than €50 million in converting a data center into what it calls a modern cloud delivery center to be named “The Air,” which will join Ficolo’s two other Finnish facilities, The Rock in Pori and The Deck in Tampere. “The investment will take Ficolo’s business to a new level, place the Helsinki metropolitan area at the forefront of the data center industry in Europe, and improve Finland’s competitiveness as a provider of next-generation IoT and Industrial Internet solutions,” said the company, which has Dr. Matthew Lamont (left), DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG) managing director, and Phil Schwan, DUG CTO, stand among the cooling tanks that make up the “Bubba” supercomputer at the Houston Skybox data center.48 JULY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO N signed a cooperation agreement with Fujitsu as part of the transaction. “Ficolo will now be able to work better as a partner for Finnish companies looking for a Finnish-owned data center, to act as a regional center for Asian companies to be established in Europe, and to act as a local data center for American companies already established in Europe,” said Seppo Ihalainen, CEO of Ficolo. He didn’t mention European companies, but they’re plenty busy too. For its own data center relocation from Stuttgart, Daimler in May chose maincubes as its new colocation partner, with a data center in Frankfurt. As it seeks to “further advance the main fields of the mobile future, i.e. networking, autonomous driving, flexible use and electric drives,” said Daimler, “in order to meet all requirements, Daimler needs an IT landscape that is scalable, secure and reliable. At the same time, cloud platforms are increasingly important to create a digital future. Among other reasons, this is why Daimler is now relocating its central data center from Stuttgart to Frankfurt — a location for Internet and cloud with high bandwidths and low latency on various services.” One reason for that low latency? The maincubes facility is near the largest German Internet Exchange point. Founded in 2012 in Frankfurt, maincubes was awarded the German Data Center Prize, and its data center in Offenbach, opened in October 2017, is a flagship among the data centers in the Rhine- Main region, said Daimler. Its other large-scale, carrier-neutral colocation facility is in Amsterdam Schiphol-Rijk. Northwest, Northeast and Southwest Maincubes is making inroads in the U.S. too: In March, the company partnered with Seattle- based data center operator Colocation Northwest, which operates eight data centers in South Hill Seattle, Downtown Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue and Redmond. The partnership is intended to grab the attention of business prospects looking for combined U.S. and European data center coverage. Reaching North American clients is also the aim of Atlantic Hub, a data center developer active in the UK and Ireland that just opened its first office on the other side of the Atlantic in Boston. Its pitch? The largest data center in the UK and Ireland, Atlantic Hub’s flagship IT services and data center in the North West S I T E S E L E C T I O N JULY 2019 49 of Ireland encompasses two mega-hub campus sites at Foyle Port Innovation Park (Derry/ Londonderry), and Letterkenny (Co. Donegal). It also has 160,000 sq. ft. of high-tech office space. Connectivity for the entire planned data center and IT services campus is supported by the GTT transatlantic fibre-optic submarine cable — the fastest connectivity available between North America and Europe. The cable’s landing station on the U.S. side of the ocean is in Lynn, Massachusetts, just a few miles north of the Boston city line at Suffolk Downs, the closed racetrack site once offered as a candidate for Amazon HQ2 that is in the process of transforming into a huge mixed-use development. Meanwhile, in the other corner of the country, Las Vegas–based technology infrastructure company Pegasus Group Holdings, a developer of renewable energy projects, in June announced it has selected Mohave County for the development of a $3 billion, 340-MW solar-powered data center. In partnership with Plus Minus Power (PMP), Pegasus will operate a solar field nicknamed “The Hive” that will create 50 jobs and occupy 717 acres just south of Kingman on I-40, just north of Recurve Energy Asset Management’s natural gas-fired, 570-MW Griffith Energy Facility. “We have selected Mohave County for its abundant sunshine, quality labor force and the overwhelming support of Supervisor Jean Bishop and the Mohave County Board of Supervisors,” said Jay Bloom, a member of Pegasus Group Holdings’ Board. “The tremendous sense of welcome and cooperation by the local government has allowed us to accelerate the launch of our project which will be operational by the end of 2019.” “Tami Ursenbach, the director of economic development for Mohave County, has been a champion in getting this project deployed on an accelerated timeline, which helped in the decision to bring our facility to Mohave County,” added M. Alberto Ramirez, co-founder and a member of Pegasus Group Holdings’ Board. So, what drives data centers to the hottest climes as well as the coldest? Renewable energy potential and, yes, a warm reception. 50 JULY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO N Northwest Ohio leads a charge for vehicles powered by natural gas. by G ARY DAUGHTERS gar y.daug hter s @ site s ele c tion.c om Keeping It Clean INVESTMENT PROFILE: NORTHWEST OHIO If you still get stuck behind exhaust-belching city buses, it probably means your local transit authority hasn’t yet made the switch from diesel-burning engines to those powered by natural gas. Compressed natural gas remains the cleanest burning transportation fuel on the market today, with 95% fewer tailpipe emissions and up to 30% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than diesel fuel. Not as sexy as electric, natural gas vehicles happen to be a proven, climate-friendly commodity. “If we want healthier air today, we need cleaner cars, trucks, buses and ships fueled by natural gas,” says Daniel Gage, president of Natural Gas Vehicles for America (NGVA), the trade association for the natural gas transportation fuel industry. “It’s available,” says Gage, “it’s on the road, it’s tested technology and it’s affordable technology. If we want clean air and want to go to a de-carbonized transportation system, you have to look at natural gas.” Buses, heavy trucks, garbage trucks and tractor trailers are the worst polluters on the roadways, accounting as they do for 23% of vehicle emissions, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Not coincidentally, it’s commercial fleet operators who are making the switch to natural gas, with 11,000 transit buses alone operating on it. “Even though the personal vehicle side of the market has pretty much gone away, we’re seeing a lot of interest around fleet vehicles, commercial vehicles and large trucks. There’s a lot of growth around CNG vehicles for that,” says Erich Evans, director of corporate strategy and development for NiSource, Inc., parent company of Columbia Gas of Ohio. “The amount of natural gas being used in transportation,” Evans says, “is probably close to twice what it was five years ago.” That certainly holds true for Ohio, where natural gas vehicle fuel consumption more than doubled from 299 million cubic feet per day (MMcf) in 2013 to 781 cubic feet per day in 2018. A good part of that is due to cost savings of up to 50% over diesel. Ohio currently has 64 natural gas fueling stations, more than triple the number it had in 2012. Clean Fuels Ohio, which supports the state’s clean transportation industry, says that nearly 5,000 natural gas fleet vehicles traverse Ohio’s roads. S I T E S E L E C T I O N JULY 2019 51 This Investment Profile was prepared under the auspices of the Regional Growth Partnership. For more information, call 419-252-2700. On the Web, go to rgp.org. Positioned for Growth Heightened interest in natural gas vehicles is largely the result of the staggering growth of natural gas production in the United States. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts U.S. dry natural gas production will average 90.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2019, up 7.2% from 2018. EIA predicts natural gas production will continue to grow in 2020. Northwest Ohio, because of its proximity to both the auto industry and the prodigious Marcellus and Utica shale fields of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, is at the nexus of efforts to promote natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to the future. Ohio’s natural gas production, according to EIA, was more than 28 times higher in 2018 than in 2012. The Marcellus and Utica produce about 26.7 Bcf/d. According to McKinsey Energy Insights, the region will supply about 40% of the North American gas market by 2030. “As validation to that point, industrial giants such as Cleveland Cliffs, Oregon Clean Energy and NSG Group, all heavy natural gas users, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars for new production facilities in Northwest Ohio,” says Gary Thompson, executive vice president of the Regional Growth Partnership, the lead economic development group serving the Toledo region and 17 counties of Northwest Ohio. “We now have gas in abundances we’d never dreamed of,” says Thompson. “Why Northwest Ohio is helping to lead the way involves location and scale. “We’re the intersection of energy, the automotive sector and the manufacturing sector,” he explains. “Detroit, with all that automotive thinking, R&D and production, is just an hour away. And then we have the suppliers and assembly plants in our region, including some of the big ones like Jeep, General Motors Powertrain, the Ford engine plant in Lima and suppliers like Dana. Those are big anchors to the automotive world, and we’re in touch with all of them. “We happen to have this rich resource in our state, and we want to use it for the good of our society,” Thompson says. “Transportation fuel is a very good candidate for that.” Ramping Up for the Future Built at a cost of $2.1 billion and completed in late 2018, the 255-mile (410-km.) Nexus pipeline has the capacity to deliver about 1.5 Bcf/d from the Marcellus and Utica shale basin to Ohio, Michigan and Ontario. A joint venture of DTE Energy and Enbridge, Inc., Nexus snakes across northern Ohio, thus positioning the region as a hub for natural gas. “We do like this area really well because it’s such a convergence of new natural gas plates, and this new Nexus pipeline is bringing Marcellus and Utica gas to new markets that haven’t traditionally been along that path,” says Ken Magyar, DTE vice president for project and business development. “It’s supply and demand, so it’s basically bringing more economic gas to the region. It’s a positive for this area, and it’s a positive for Ohio, using this resource that’s available to it.” Nexus is one of several gas pipelines designed to connect growing output from the Marcellus and Utica shale basin to Ohio, Michigan and Ontario. DTE is spending billions of dollars on natural gas infrastructure, including the recent purchase of the 23-mile (37-km.) Generation Pipeline, which DTE plans to connect to Nexus. Much of that natural gas will go toward firing power plants that, in turn, power electric cars. “Whether we put the natural gas in the automobile,” says Thompson, “or we convert power plants to generate more electricity, or even some mix of that, now we’re actually fulfilling the promise of clean energy that drivers think they’re getting with electric.” The newly completed Nexus pipeline is delivering natural gas across northern Ohio. All photos courtesy NGVA52 JULY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO N Baltimore and Maryland look to lap the fi eld again in the race to cybersuperiority. ‘All the Talent In the World’ Northrop Grumman opened a Cyber Center in San Antonio last year. e $ million Georgia Cyber Center opened early this ye ar in Augusta. Cyber skills initiatives are ramping up everywhere from Michigan Tech to Cal Poly to Carnegie Mellon. But Maryland is still the undisputed champion. And it’s trying to lap the fi eld. In May, Baltimore leaders held a ceremonial groundbreaking to mark the beginning of construction on the next phase of one of the largest urban renewal eff orts in America — Port Covington, the $. billion, -acre (-hectare) redevelopment project on Baltimore City’s prime waterfront where Bethleheem Steel’s furnaces once roared. e fi rst buildings are set to be delivered in Fall . At full build-out, the fi rst phase will include approximately . million sq. ft. (, sq. m.) of offi ce, in addition to hotel, residential and retail space. At completion, the entire project also will include . miles ( km.) of restored waterfront and acres ( hectares) of parks and green space. “ e Port Covington of today is a completely diff erent place than what it was just a few short years ago, and we are just getting started,” said Marc Weller, founding partner of Weller Development Company and lead developer of Port Covington. Port Covington will feature several key ecosystems focused on technology, life sciences and education. One of the fi rst is focused on cybersecurity. DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup studio with offi ces in Maryland and Silicon Valley; AllegisCyber, one of the oldest Silicon Valley-based early-stage cybersecurity venture capital fi rms; and Evergreen Advisors, a Columbia, Md.-based investment banking and corporate advisory fi rm focused on assisting emerging growth and middle-market companies, will anchor Rye Street Market, the fi rst area of property to be constructed. “With Maryland’s highly talented workforce, cutting-edge research institutions, and more and more innovative companies locating here each year, no state is better equipped or better positioned to be the cyber and innovation capital of our nation,” said Maryland Governor Larry by ADAM BRUNS adam.br uns @ site s ele c tion.c om CYBERSECURITY S I T E S E L E C T I O N JULY 2019 53 FACING PAGE: Rye Street Market is the center of activity in Port Covington, and will be where cybersecurity rms cluster. Rendering courtesy of Weller Development Company Mike Janke, Co-Founder, Data Tribe Hogan last October when the Port Covington cyber scheme was hatched. “We are located in the midst of the country’s deepest and largest reservoir of cybersecurity engineering talent, including some of the fastest growing commercial cyber fi rms in the world,” said Mike Janke, co-founder of DataTribe. “Maryland is home to the world’s most advanced cybersecurity and data science coming out of the U.S. intelligence agencies, R&D labs and commercial innovation centers. Maryland has the largest cyber workforce in the world, with more than , cyber-related engineering and data science professionals. Port Covington will become home to Cyber Town USA as a leading technology hub not only for entrepreneurs and engineering talent, but also for the resources necessary for them to be successful.” Build ‘Em Up, Move ‘Em Out In an interview, serial entrepreneur Janke, a former Navy SEAL, says in building his previous fi rms, he’d moved plenty of talent out of the classifi ed space to Silicon Valley, but he and his co-founder Bob Ackerman (founder of Allegis Capital) saw it was not sustainable, and looked or a way to move Mohammed to the mountain — i.e. the mountain of skills in Maryland and the nation’s capital region. “ e sheer volume of nation-state, trained DARPA and related talent was literally three times the rest of the country in Maryland,” he says, “but it had a nascent ecosystem. e idea was to build something diff erent than a regular venture fi rm.” us Data Tribe was created, ready to invest in and co-build four companies a year with $ million a year, get them to their A round of funding, and move them out. e fi rst one sold to Hortonworks in six months for $ million, “so we knew that was over-resourcing it,” Janke says. On average, he says, from to , the average startup took months from the time it got seed money to completing “A” series funding. “We averaged . months,” he says. “We literally cut the average in half. And three of our fi rst nine had the highest ‘A’ round valuations in . It shows the talent and innovation is here.” Janke describes a hypothetical scenario that sounds like a video game but isn’t: “Imagine you’re working at NSA, and tasked with a team of with building a product to breach the Chinese and listen in to everything. You do, and deploy it, then realize the whole world is susceptible to that. We pull them out and build a commercial version to protect against that capability.” So far, % of Data Tribe’s deal fl ow is coming out of Silicon Valley — “an ex-DARPA teams with a Googler and wants to come back,” Janke says. “We’re shedding off four companies a year that are like rocket ships, with between $ million and $ million in funding. Typically in a year they go from three to people, and in two years to about .” And you don’t fi nd the talent out west. “In the Valley, you don’t have nation-state-trained cyber engineers with eight years at Fort Meade [in Maryland] building up against China, Iran, North Korea and others,” he says. “ at turns out to be a critical experience component. e other side is cost. We have companies where they’re looking for a data scientist in a startup, and LinkedIn will off er them a $. million signing bonus. at’s almost the entire seed round. You can’t compete there because the giant tech corporations can literally out-hire and turnover is so high, let alone rent and salaries. We’re about % less to build a company than in the Valley.” Janke says while other jurisdictions pour tens of millions of dollars into branding themselves as cyber-this and cyber-that, “We don’t need to because we have all the talent in the world.” Moreover, he says, the talent that is out west isn’t afraid to make the move to Baltimore. To stack the deck even more, the IRS just ruled that Port Covington is within an Opportunity Zone. e U.S. Cyber Command, NSA and other classifi ed technical agencies are just up the road. In short, says Janke, “you have to screw up really bad” not to take advantage of the head start CyberTown USA has in Port Covington. And gradually a tribe beyond Data Tribe is assembling, with the goal of aggregating the largest neighborhood of commercial cybersecurity in the world. “Right now Tel Aviv claims the largest in a business park, with ,” Janke says. “We’re going to move in over on day one.” Shifting map of America’s factory belt highlights migration pattern of good jobs. by RON S TARNER r on. s t ar ner @ site s ele c tion.c om America’s factory belt isn’t just shrinking in size. It’s becoming ever more clustered in a handful of Midwestern and Southeastern states. ose are among the principal fi ndings in a landmark study published June by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) in partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co. “ e Way We Were: e Changing Geography of U.S. Manufacturing from to ” details how the industry migrated from the Northeast to hubs in the Midwest and Southeast by the early s. Decades of major declines in employment in favor of large increases in productivity have produced an America in which only states employ at least % of their workers in manufacturing and just two states, Indiana and Wisconsin, where manufacturing remains the largest source of employment. From to , manufacturing declined by million jobs in America while manufacturing output grew by $ trillion, according to the CEW report. ese dramatic changes were especially felt in the Northeast, Midwest and Southeast. In , % of American workers were Lessons from Manufacturing’s Front Lines Welding is an occupation in high demand in Northeast Wisconsin. Without programs like NEWMA, many employers in the region would be facing critical worker shortages in this key eld. Photo courtesy of NEWMA ADVANCED MAN UFACTURING 54 JULY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO NNext >