CHICAGO—North American data centers saw tremendous growth in 2015, which came as a bit of a surprise to many experts, but that expansion has built confidence in the sector's 2016 prospects, and Midwest cities like Chicago should get big shares of the new development.

"Cloud providers were very bullish on taking down space in 2015," Sean Reynolds, a regional director in JLL's data center solutions group, tells GlobeSt.com, and there was a worry that their customers would hesitate to change how they stored data, and leave much of this space unused. But "their customers followed," and the quick adaptations led to a healthy rate of growth.

Multi-tenant data center providers in the US earned revenues of $115.3 billion in 2015 and experienced 6.1% growth, according to JLL's new data center perspective report. And the metro regions of Northern VA and Dallas were the national standouts with 63 MWs and 42 MWs of net absorption, respectively. Northern VA has cemented itself as a data center hotspot through "its low latency, robust fiber networks, attractive incentives, broad-based competitive provider marketplace and largest market share of cloud operators," the report states.