CAPRE’s Data Center Round Up For September 30, 2019

Check out the latest in deals, development and disruptive technology in the data center industry for September 30, 2019:

CyrusOne Cements Eligibility for Tax Incentives in NoVa: CyrusOne has qualified for tax incentives in Loudoun County, exempting customers from sales tax payments on all equipment deployed in our data centers located in that county. While customers typically look to minimize lease and power costs, taxes often get overlooked and can make up a significant hidden cost. The tax incentive will dramatically decrease the cost of deploying computer and network equipment in CyrusOne’s facilities, allowing CyrusOne to focus on lowering customers’ total cost of ownership. With more than 70% of the world’s internet traffic passing through Loudoun County’s digital infrastructure, there is also a unique opportunity for retroactive tax refunds from expenses dating back to 2014.

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Google to Go East: Google Cloud will open a Polish cloud region, located centrally between its German cloud hubs and its easternmost and northernmost outpost in Finland. “As part of our commitment to Poland and broader Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), we will also open a Google Cloud region in Warsaw, Poland. With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in CEE will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, and will launch with our portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery,” wrote Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud in a blog post.
Edgecore Networks cross-contributes Designs for a Family of Cell Site Gateways across TIP and OCP Open Communities: Edgecore Networks, the leader in open networking, today announced a series of cross-contributions of Cell Site Gateways across the Telecom Infra Project and the Open Compute Project communities. The contributed products enable service providers to deploy 4G and 5G services with the economics of disaggregated open network technology. The AS7316-26XB cell site gateway design and specification, that was contributed to OCP in October 2018, has now been contributed to TIP’s Open Optical & Packet Transport project group. The AS7315-27X-DCSG cell site gateway specification, which was developed as part of TIP’s Disaggregated Cell Site Gateways (DCSG) initiative and contributed to TIP, is now also being contributed to the OCP community. This family of contributed designs will accelerate service provider adoption of open networking options to meet the increasing bandwidth and service demand in the upcoming 5G rollouts.
Alibaba Introduces First AI Inference Chip: Alibaba has unveiled its first AI inference chip today, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800 that according to Alibiaba quickens machine learning tasks dramatically as well as makes them more energy-efficient. Hanguang 800 is already powering features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product search and personalized recommendations, and will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers in the near future. Alibaba says that the chip has enabled them to reduce the processing time for one billion images from one hour down to five minutes.
QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center Approved for New Sales & Use Tax Exemptions: QTS Realty Trust’s Atlanta Metro mega data center has achieved qualification as a Certified High-Technology Data Center by the state of Georgia. The qualification follows passage of Georgia HB 696 that created an exemption for sales and use tax on certain equipment to be used in high-technology data centers. Over nearly five years, QTS and the Technology Association of Georgia have introduced, sponsored and stewarded the passage of HB 696. The legislation modernizes Georgia’s data center tax policy enabling the current tax exemption to be applied to colocation and hyperscale data centers with a minimum investment of $250 million and will significantly benefit QTS’ Atlanta Metro and Suwanee data centers and their tenants. The exemption is retroactive, and enables QTS and tenants to receive a tax refund on qualified purchases subsequent to July 1, 2018.