The Commonwealth's colleges and universities are working to equip students with the skills that will be required to perform data science-related tasks. 

After a year of focusing on operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, data center investments are on the rise, with an eye on expanding capacity to meet pandemic-influenced changes in consumer behavior.

First Data Resources to locate new facility in Virginia

Richmond - Governor Jim Gilmore today announced that First Data Resources, Inc., a leading global provider of transaction processing services, will locate a $15 million credit card personalization and distribution center in the City of Chesapeake. The company will initially hire 120 workers and anticipates adding up to a total of 500 new jobs.

RICHMOND - Governor Bob McDonnell today announced that Microsoft Corp. will invest $348 million to expand its modular data center site in Mecklenburg County. The company will build two additional facilities on its data center campus to increase capacity to serve its growing customer base. The project will create 30 new jobs. Microsoft’s original project in 2010 involved an investment of up to $499 million and 50 new jobs. In 2011 the company invested an additional $150 million to expand the site.

RICHMOND - Governor Bob McDonnell today announced that Rackspace® Hosting, (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, is expanding its IT hosting operation in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Montgomery County. The project will result in a $5.5 million investment in building construction and improvements and is expected to provide capacity for more than 100 new jobs at the Rackspace facility.

RICHMOND - Governor Bob McDonnell today announced that QTS (Quality Technology Services), one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing privately held providers of data center facilities and managed services, has acquired the former 1.3 million square-foot Qimonda facility, which includes nearly $1.1 billion dollars of existing state-of-the-art infrastructure in Henrico County. QTS will invest more than $100 million over the next three years to retrofit the property to provide the most secure and reliable data center services in the area.

Tate, a global provider of next-generation infrastructure solutions for commercial and data center applications, will invest $14.9 million to establish a new manufacturing facility in Russell County.

VFP Inc., a custom building solutions manufacturer, will invest $5 million to expand its facility in Scott County, creating 50 new jobs.

Susie Adams, CTO for federal government business at Microsoft, speaks about data centers, Big Data, and the future of cloud and edge computing.