A lot of the groups building data centers in the early 2000s were tech companies. I was with one of them at the time, and we just built big blocks of space, not as big as we do today. We built a bunch of white floor, put the network piece in the middle, started on the corners and just figured all of the components would grow into each other. People don't do that today. The evolution of data centers as a real estate class has created some discipline that has been healthy for the industry. You'll see people announce 500,000 or a million square feet, but they build it in increments, and they're able to add new supply very quickly but not in the same way that people did during the tech bubble.

The other thing that's healthy for the industry is the balance sheets of the people taking the space down. If you look at a lot of the hyperscale cloud firms that are taking down the big blocks of space, the vast majority of them are very healthy companies with strong balance sheets.

GlobeSt.com: Is development and construction dominated by some of the large data center REITs, or are companies which aren't even necessarily real estate firms involved as well?

Lynch: In the past year or two, the data center REITs have performed very well. Two of the six largest public REITs are data center REITs when you look at Equinix and Digital Realty. You're also seeing a lot of the private data center companies get recapitalized, in the case of Vantage Data Centers or Cologix, or get acquired in the case of Zenium. So there is consolidation going on, but it's not just the public companies. There's a significant amount of private capital that's still involved in the space.

GlobeSt.com: Looking at the investor profile, since data centers are still something of a specialty category, it would seem that those who play in that space tend to be more knowledgeable and committed. It's not a sector for those who are only looking for a passive income stream.

Lynch: Not necessarily. Given the performance of the space, the inquiries that we're fielding across the platform from people wanting to learn more and wanting to invest in the data center space increased significantly in the past year. We tracked approximately $22 billion in capital markets activity, including asset sales, M&A and recapitalizations. That's a significant volume of dollars transacted in what has historically been something of a niche market. We're seeing some of the traditional real estate players move into the space, and in many cases looking for operators to bring that expertise to them. We saw that in 2017 and we expect to continue to see it happening in '18.

GlobeSt.com: In terms of space demand drivers, are we seeing a mix of smaller tenants incrementally accounting for space along with the big cloud data providers?

Lynch: It's all of the above. The biggest users of space are clearly the hyperscale cloud providers, and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. On the next tier down, think about financial services, human resources, storage services—there's a whole litany of successful companies that are also deploying a global public cloud and are very likely to be taking colocation space. We're seeing that in the marketplace.

Two years ago, the word was that everything is moving to the cloud. We're not seeing that, but we are seeing our clients adopting hybrid IT. They're taking some of their business and putting it into the cloud, but a piece of it is staying in a colocation enterprise data center. It's not a matter of “cloud or colocation, pick one.” Most of our clients, regardless of industry, are doing a little bit of all of that.