At our Bisnow national Data Center Investment Conference & Expo (DICE) last week in Crystal City, we caught up with CyrusOne's Fred Holloway, whose firm has a 124k SF data center under construction in Sterling in Loudoun County. The property is on a 15-acre site in the Loudoun Tech Center, and Fred says there's room to double the size of the property in future phases. (We'll need it since there are 4,000 Transformers sequels being planned, all that have to stream on Netflix.) Due to a robust fiber network and affordable power sources, Loudoun is one of the hottest data center markets in the country, if not the world.

Just ask Loudoun County director of economic development Buddy Rizer (right, with PECO Energy's Ed Piscopo). Buddy says the county permitted 1M SF in new data centers last year, will permit another 1M this year, and hopes to grow that number to 2M SF next year. The power, fiber, and cooperation of the county to get things done quickly have aided Loudoun, Buddy says, instead of offering massive tax breaks like other counties nationwide.

Compressing yields in other real estate asset classes (as well as the stock market) are causing investors to look at buying data centers, says DH Capital's Doug Webster (second from right, with Mintz Levin's Jeff Moerdler, Columbia Capital's John Siegel, and Rugen Street Capital's Rob Morris). "The universe of buyers is broadening significantly since revenues are declining in other investments."

We caught up with Mark Thomas from Georgetown—no, not that Georgetown, rather the city just outside of Austin, TX. Mark serves as Georgetown's director of economic development, and says the city is actively marketing sites for data center construction, hoping that another big company follows in the footsteps of Citigroup, which built a $450M facility there in 2008.