EdgeConnex is betting big that demand for data centers will continue to expand, especially for smaller Tier-2 and Tier-3 locations that are typically closer to end-users.

The company late last month announced a seven-fold expansion of capacity at its Edge Data Center campus in Denver. That expansion is in the form of a new 115,000-square foot building that can support up to 21 megawatts of capacity.

The Denver facility was constructed in six months adjacent to its current building. It will offer carrier-neutral support for content, network, cloud, and IT providers. It can support up to 30 kilowatts of power per rack.

EdgeConnex touts its Denver campus as being in the heart of the Denver Technology Center, but that description needs some clarification. While it’s certainly in the vicinity of what is known locally as the “DTC,” the actual nondescript buildings are somewhat removed from much of civilization.

This is to be expected as building costs are a big part of EdgeConnex's financial burden. And a building that size in a high-rent district is not part of the company’s operating thesis. The new building is cavernous. From the outside it looks like any office building in the neighborhood. But inside, the building is currently empty, which accentuates its size.

Jeff King, vice president and general manager for the Denver market at EdgeConnex, explained that the company was in talks with a number of entities to occupy portions of that space. He noted that it would likely be a couple of years before the building looked more like a data center and less like a jumbo jet hangar.

Comcast has been a big driver for EdgeConnex in the Denver market. EdgeConnex’s current data center, which opened in 2014, houses Comcast’s DVR services. EdgeConnex also houses Comcast operations across 16 locations around the country.

One of those other locations is in Portland, Oregon. King said that location was more “mature” than the Denver office, and that Denver will be looking to mimic Portland's expansion process. “It will depend on the demand of our customers and growth from cloud providers,” King said.

As part of the Denver expansion, EdgeConnex also struck a deal with Megaport to deploy its software-defined networking (SDN) platform to support elastic interconnection services within the facility. Megaport's SDN platform allows for scaling of bandwidth needs from 1 Mb/s up to 10 Gb/s.

EdgeConnex works with Megaport in a number of its locations, including Boston; Portland; San Diego; Houston; Phoenix; and Santa Clara, California. The companies last month began tapping the Megaport platform to connect into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s FastConnect service.

EdgeConnex this week signed a deal with Colt Technology Services to use its Colt IQ Network platform connect into EdgeConnex’s facilities. The initial use will be for its data center campus in Amsterdam, which is one of the company's largest campuses.

The Colt platform includes aggregation points with multiple 100 Gb/s transatlantic and transpacific connections, in addition to 100 Gb/s links in the Asia-Pacific region. It’s distributed across more than 850 data centers and carrier hotels and more than 26,000 on-net buildings around the world.

Megaport announced a deal in April with Colt’s Data Center Services division to provide connectivity for Colt DCS customers into cloud platforms. Those platforms include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).