McGuireWoods partners Greg Riegle and Dale Mullen were quoted in an April 3, 2020, Virginia Business article on the increased demand for cloud storage and networking services on data centers in Northern Virginia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article attributed the need for more bandwidth to remote workers using video teleconferencing software for meetings and the skyrocketing use of streaming services at home.
How long will it take to complete data center projects to meet the increased demand? “It depends,” said Riegle, who leads the firm’s real estate capital industry team. “Even without the need for conditional zoning approvals, it’s still [seven to nine] months to get a permit to get in the ground and turn a shovel and start constructing. And then it’s still another several months to build the building.”
Even taking this timeline into consideration, the high demand for cloud computing infrastructure due to increased teleworking will result in data centers in more populated areas in Virginia, said Mullen, managing partner of McGuireWoods’ Tysons office and co-leader of the firm’s national data centers practice with Riegle. “From a Virginia business perspective, you will see centers of data located in more places,” Mullen said.