While it’s best known for pro sports and Coca-Cola, Atlanta has become a preeminent North American tech hub over the past few years. Its data center market was named the fastest-growing in the United States in 2024, with the city ranking as the sixth largest market for commissioned data center power and its data center leasing numbers hitting record highs last year. Hyperscalers are taking notice, with Meta and Google establishing substantial presences and Microsoft building three data center campuses in 2024.
Amid this tech boom, more investment is flowing into Atlanta’s surrounding areas as the downtown center becomes increasingly crowded, with Lithia Springs emerging as a significant tech hub. Whether it’s Atlanta’s disaster resilience, strategic location or available space and power, the region’s many advantages position it as a top innovation center in North America, particularly while space and power become increasingly strained in nearby Northern Virginia.
Downtown Atlanta’s legacy carrier hotels struggle to keep pace with the bandwidth, space and power requirements of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) applications, cloud computing, media streaming, hyperscaler investment and more. These challenges must be solved through a connectivity footprint that balances a strong metro network with routes and Points-of-Presence (PoPs) that can serve local edge markets without sacrificing performance, speed or capacity.
We at Arelion strive to do just that by ensuring our network not only provides diversity into downtown Atlanta but also supports Atlanta’s suburban ring, fostering a connectivity ecosystem crucial to the city’s continued tech boom.
With that said, let’s explore how Arelion’s global network facilitates Atlanta’s long-term growth.
Our Atlanta Network
Atlanta Metro Network Expansion: As downtown Atlanta’s tech ecosystem becomes increasingly congested, our diverse suburban ring is essential to providing the region with low-latency connectivity. With this in mind, we expanded metro network connectivity in Atlanta’s surrounding areas, including new PoPs in Switch ATLANTA and Centersquare, data center campuses in Lithia Springs within Douglas County. Douglas County has seen accelerated data center investment recently, with over $4 billion spent since 2015.
This expansion also included a new long-haul route connecting Lithia Springs to our Ashburn, VA and Dallas, TX networks via Chattanooga, TN, adding diversity into downtown Atlanta. With this network expansion, we connected Atlanta’s suburban data center campuses and provided diverse connectivity options at the network edge, reducing the need to route through downtown Atlanta and ensuring seamless, low-latency connectivity for hyperscalers and enterprises.
Increasing Capacity from Ashburn, VA to Atlanta: Ashburn, VA to Atlanta is one of our highest-traffic routes in North America, strategically positioned between two major tech hubs. We experienced immense demand for terabit-scale bandwidth between these hubs, driving us to upgrade our existing open line systems on multiple diverse routes to support the L-band.
This upgrade reflects our longstanding investments in open optical networking innovations to benefit our customers by improving cost efficiency, power consumption and capacity. As a result, we have doubled capacity per fiber pair amid supply constraints in long-distance fiber, enabling us to serve the mounting bandwidth requirements of AI/ML, cloud computing, content delivery and more despite fiber’s physical limitations.
Diverse Routes Serving the Subsea and Atlanta’s Local Enterprises: Our most recent Atlanta network expansion included new multi-terabit, low-latency routes from Jacksonville, FL to Atlanta and Tallahassee, and a new overbuild route from Miami, FL, up Florida’s west coast to Atlanta, providing fully diverse connectivity from Jacksonville to Atlanta via two direct routes. These routes also support subsea traffic flows into Atlanta from the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Following these deployments, we can serve the connectivity needs of Atlanta’s local enterprises while supporting subsea traffic into Atlanta from Florida’s edge markets, enabling low-latency cloud, content and AI/ML data delivery. This expansion establishes a total of six diverse route options into the booming Atlanta market via our #1 ranked North American network.
Arelion continues to invest in North American network infrastructure as demand accelerates for capacity and connectivity. AI/ML requires an agile partner with a diverse and dynamic network architecture to build and scale these solutions now and in the future.
For the next installment of our Connectivity Chronicles series, we’ll explore our network in Mexico amid the region’s growing nearshoring investments, including key routes, PoPs and market drivers.
Johan Ottosson, VP Strategy & Product Management
Previous blogs in the ‘Connectivity Chronicles’ series: