Virginia has attracted the lion's share of high-tech and Internet businesses in part because of its location along the Net's main pipeline, with a major node in Fairfax. In addition to being AOL headquarters, Prince William County has also welcomed locations from Data Centers Now and Covad. Now, U.S. DataPort is moving on a 2 million-sq.-ft. (186,000-sq.-m.) data center there as well, while DataCentersNow is installing a 400,000-sq.-ft. (37,000-sq.-m.) facility in Loudoun, joining fellow county corporate citizens WorldCom, AOL, UUNet and PSINet. The latest tech firm to be scouting the area is none other than Cisco, apparently searching for 100 acres (40 ha.) for a campus site.
     In Manassas, SanDisk and Toshiba just invested $700 million in FlashVision LLC, a semiconductor company focused on the making of flash memory. Another growth center is Richmond, where companies like IG2, Verio and Network Solutions Registry are prominent employers. The most recent high-tech announcement was to welcome a plant expansion by Infineon Technologies Richmond, formerly known as White Oak Semiconductor. The facility will be the first 300-mm wafer production facility on the East Coast and will create 1,100 new jobs by early 2002.
     As in several states, it's the second-tier cities that are coming on strong in New York, such as Rochester, where international printing giant Heidelberg Digital's 1 million-sq.-.ft. (93,000-sq.-m.) worldwide headquarters is in Rochester Technology Park. It's just part of a 500-acre (202-ha.) campus with available space that's close to several Interstates and an international airport.
     Rounding out this U.S. high-tech hopscotch is New England, which ranks second in the U.S. only to Silicon Valley in its number of high-tech jobs -- many of them in the Greater Boston area. With 2000 vacancy rates at incredibly low levels in Boston proper (1.86 percent) and Cambridge (an incredible 0.38 percent), companies wanting to be part of this New England high-tech mecca have looked to "America's Technology Highway," Route 128. Yet according to a report on that market from corporate real estate firm Thompson, Doyle, Hennessey & Everest, some tenants on this highway have seen exorbitant pressures, like rents jumping as high as 200 percent since their last lease agreements, often signed just a few years ago. And the building of corporate campuses by the likes of Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Cisco has led land acquisition costs to catapult upward. Recent lease transactions along Route 128 have included such high-tech notables as Storage Networks, Global Crossing, E.piphany and GiantLoop Networks. In and around the towns of Bedford, Burlington and Woburn along 128 North, Nokia, RSA Security, Oracle and Genuity are building more than 1.5 million sq. ft. (139,000 sq. m.).
     "It's partly strategic -- by having operations on the east and west coasts, they can all work together to get the job done internationally," says firm principal Christopher N. Everest in explaining the area's penchant for banging heads with its California rival. "High-tech firms want both coasts for their timetables, to deal with Asia and Europe. So now you're seeing large campuses from companies like Sun [1.3 million sq. ft./120,700 sq. m.], Cisco and Genuity."