When enterprises evaluate colocation options, the default conversation gravitates toward the usual suspects: Northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, New York. These are mature, dense markets with deep infrastructure ecosystems, and for many organizations, they are the right answer. But for a significant and growing segment of enterprise deployments — media and entertainment companies, Pacific Rim-connected businesses, cloud-first organizations, and anyone who needs to reach the western United States and Asia-Pacific at genuinely low latency — Los Angeles is not just a viable option. It is the best one.
This article makes the case for why Los Angeles deserves serious consideration as a primary or secondary data center location, and why Downtown Los Angeles in particular has emerged as one of the most interconnected, infrastructure-dense corridors in the country.
Location selection in data center strategy is not simply about finding a city near your headquarters or users. It involves a more complex set of variables: where your traffic originates and terminates, what cloud regions and internet exchanges you need to access, what your latency requirements actually are for the applications you run, and what the regulatory environment looks like for your industry and data types.
A truly strategic data center location is one where the physical infrastructure density, the carrier ecosystem, the network peering fabric, and the geographic positioning combine to produce better performance, more routing options, and lower costs than alternatives. By those criteria, Los Angeles makes a compelling argument — one that many enterprises outside the entertainment and media sector have been slow to fully appreciate.
The single most differentiated characteristic of Los Angeles as a data center market is its position as the primary landing point for transpacific subsea cable infrastructure connecting the United States to Asia-Pacific. This is not a marketing claim — it is a physical fact of network topology that has profound implications for any organization whose operations, users, or partners span the Pacific.
Los Angeles is home to the landing stations for a significant portion of the transpacific cable systems connecting to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other major Asia-Pacific markets. Traffic between the U.S. and those markets does not need to route through a second domestic hub before crossing the Pacific — it terminates, or can be exchanged, in Los Angeles directly.
For organizations with meaningful Asia-Pacific exposure — which increasingly includes businesses across financial services, technology, media, logistics, and manufacturing — this geographic reality translates into lower latency, fewer network hops, and more predictable performance than any other U.S. data center market can offer for Pacific-facing workloads.
Within Los Angeles, the Downtown corridor has developed into one of the most fiber-dense urban data center environments in the United States. This concentration of infrastructure did not happen by accident — it reflects decades of investment by carriers, data center operators, and internet exchanges that recognized the strategic value of the geography.
The DTLA data center network is interconnected by primary fiber routes linking facilities within a compact geographic area. Within just a few city blocks, the network includes access points at major carrier hotels and data center facilities — One Wilshire, 600 W 7th (Digital Realty LAX10, Equinix LA1), 626 Wilshire (Telehouse), 530 W 6th (Cogent), 800 S. Hope (Verizon), and 900 Alameda (Coresite LA2 and LA3) among others.
This density means something concrete for enterprise customers: the ability to reach a large number of networks, content providers, and cloud platforms with minimal latency and at a low cost per cross-connect, because the distance between interconnection points is measured in blocks rather than miles. The practical effect is faster routing, more competitive pricing on bandwidth, and more redundancy options than are available in less concentrated markets.
A data center is only as valuable as the networks you can reach from it. For enterprise colocation, this means evaluating not just whether a facility has fiber, but how many carriers are present, how diverse they are, and whether the providers that matter for your specific traffic patterns are accessible on-net.
The Downtown Los Angeles market supports a carrier ecosystem of genuine depth. Major national carriers including AT&T, Verizon, and Zayo operate in the market alongside specialized providers such as American Dark Fiber, Crown Castle, Edison Fiber Services, Frontier Communications, and LADWP Fiber Services. Dark fiber and lit transport options add flexibility for organizations with high-bandwidth requirements or specific routing needs. Fixed wireless options are also available through riser and roof access at select facilities.
The on-site carrier mix at a well-positioned DTLA colocation facility gives enterprises the ability to pursue true carrier diversity — multiple independent fiber paths from independent providers — which is the foundation of any serious redundancy strategy. A carrier failure or a fiber cut affects one path, not your connectivity.
For enterprises running hybrid cloud or multi-cloud architectures — which today means most large organizations — the ability to reach cloud platforms via direct, private connectivity rather than the public internet is both a performance requirement and increasingly a compliance expectation.
Los Angeles offers direct cloud on-ramp access to Google Cloud via Google Connect, Microsoft Azure via ExpressRoute, and Amazon Web Services via AWS Direct Connect. These connections allow enterprise workloads to traverse a private, low-latency path between on-premises infrastructure in a colocation facility and cloud-hosted resources, without the variability and security exposure of routing over the public internet.
The fact that these cloud on-ramps are accessible directly in the DTLA market — rather than requiring a cross-country backhaul to reach a dedicated cloud peering point — is a meaningful performance advantage for organizations whose cloud consumption is significant. Latency on a cloud workload that hits a Los Angeles on-ramp is measurably lower than the same workload routing to a Virginia or Texas cloud region from a west coast user population.
Los Angeles is the global capital of entertainment, and that industry concentration has shaped the data center ecosystem in ways that create specific value for media and entertainment companies, their technology partners, and adjacent industries.
The infrastructure requirements of large-scale media and entertainment operations — broadcast, streaming, visual effects rendering, post-production, content distribution, live event production — are highly specialized. They demand extraordinary bandwidth, extremely low latency for real-time workflows, high-density computing for rendering and encoding, and direct connectivity to content delivery networks and streaming platforms.
The DTLA data center ecosystem has evolved in direct response to these demands. The carrier ecosystem includes providers with deep media industry experience. The network peering fabric has been built out to support the high-bandwidth, latency-sensitive workflows that media production requires. And the geographic co-location of studios, post-production houses, streaming platforms, and their technology vendors in the Los Angeles market creates an interconnection fabric that simply does not exist elsewhere.
For technology companies serving the media and entertainment industry — cloud rendering platforms, content management systems, metadata and rights management providers, live streaming infrastructure companies — a Los Angeles presence is not an option. It is a prerequisite for being taken seriously by the customer base they serve.
Setting aside the Pacific Rim and media industry angles, Los Angeles is simply the largest metro area in the western United States and the second-largest in the country. Any organization with a significant user base in the western half of the country — from the Pacific Coast through the Mountain West and into the Southwest — will achieve lower latency serving those users from a Los Angeles-based data center than from a Chicago or Dallas facility.
This matters for applications where user-facing performance is important: e-commerce platforms, SaaS applications, gaming, financial trading interfaces, real-time communications, and any service where response time affects user experience or retention. A Los Angeles colocation presence is an investment in the performance quality delivered to a very large and economically significant user population.
Enterprises that have historically deployed all infrastructure in eastern U.S. markets often discover, when they actually measure it, that their west coast users are experiencing latency penalties that are degrading application performance and user satisfaction. A western edge presence, anchored in Los Angeles, addresses that problem directly.
From a business continuity perspective, Los Angeles serves as a natural geographic complement to eastern and central U.S. data center locations. An organization with a primary facility in Northern Virginia or Chicago gains genuine geographic separation — and therefore genuine resilience against regional disasters, power outages, or network events — by maintaining a secondary presence in Los Angeles.
The DTLA market is not immune to risk — no market is — but the risk profile is geographically independent from eastern U.S. locations. A weather event, utility disruption, or regional network issue affecting Virginia, Ohio, or Texas does not affect Los Angeles simultaneously. That independence is the fundamental value of geographic distribution in a disaster recovery architecture.
For organizations that need to serve the western U.S. and Asia-Pacific markets even during a primary site failure, a Los Angeles secondary facility is the natural choice: it provides geographic separation, serves the right user populations, and maintains the Pacific Rim connectivity that a Virginia or Chicago site cannot replicate.
For organizations that require scalable internet transit — from 1 Gbps up to 100 Gbps — Los Angeles supports high-performance IP infrastructure with full BGP routing, native IPv4 and IPv6 support, and direct peering with Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. The combination of clean IP space, redundant paths, and smart routing delivers the kind of consistent 24/7 performance that mission-critical applications demand.
This matters particularly for organizations running cloud-native architectures, VoIP infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and content delivery operations, where predictable, low-latency connectivity is not a nice-to-have but an operational requirement. Los Angeles, with its carrier density and peering infrastructure, is one of the few U.S. markets where that level of performance is consistently achievable at scale.
Los Angeles is a large and geographically sprawling metro area, and not all data center locations within it are equal. The strategic value of Los Angeles as a data center market is concentrated in the Downtown corridor, where the carrier density, the fiber infrastructure, the internet exchange access, and the proximity to transpacific cable landing stations combine.
Facilities located outside the DTLA core — in the San Fernando Valley, the South Bay, or other suburban locations — may offer lower real estate costs, but they sacrifice the interconnection density that makes Los Angeles a genuinely strategic choice. For organizations where the primary motivation for a Los Angeles presence is connectivity performance, Pacific Rim access, or media industry proximity, the Downtown location is the right choice, not a secondary consideration.
A carrier-neutral facility positioned within the DTLA fiber network, connected to the primary routes that link One Wilshire, Equinix LA1, Digital Realty LAX10, and Coresite LA, gives customers access to the full value of the Los Angeles market. A suburban facility, however well-built, does not.
Based on the factors above, the following types of organizations have the most compelling reasons to evaluate a Los Angeles colocation presence:
• Companies with significant Asia-Pacific operations, customers, or partners, for whom transpacific latency is a measurable business issue
• Media, entertainment, streaming, and content technology companies whose industry ecosystem is concentrated in Los Angeles
• SaaS and cloud-native technology companies with a large western U.S. user base that is currently being underserved from eastern infrastructure
• Financial services firms with trading, operations, or customer relationships involving Pacific Rim markets
• Organizations building out disaster recovery architecture that requires genuine geographic separation from eastern primary sites
• Logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing companies with significant Pacific Rim trade relationships
• Any organization running IP transit, VoIP, or real-time communications services that needs consistent sub-20ms performance to western U.S. populations
The data center location decision is ultimately a performance and risk decision. Where your infrastructure lives determines who you can reach, how fast you can reach them, what networks and clouds you can connect to, and how resilient your operations are against the inevitable disruptions that affect any single geography.
For the right workloads and the right organizations, Los Angeles is not just a competitive option among many — it is the clearly superior choice. The Pacific Rim connectivity, the DTLA fiber density, the carrier ecosystem, the media industry infrastructure, and the western U.S. population coverage combine to create a data center market with a differentiated value proposition that no other U.S. city can replicate.
DP Data Centers operates at 818 W 7th St in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, directly connected to the DTLA fiber network and the carrier ecosystem that makes this market strategically valuable. If your organization is evaluating a Los Angeles colocation presence — whether as a primary site, a secondary disaster recovery location, or a Pacific Rim connectivity hub — we would welcome the opportunity to discuss what that looks like in practice. Get in touch for a fast, responsive quote tailored to your specific requirements.
© 2025 Downtown Properties LLC. All rights reserved.