Do you consider the United States to be the safest and cheapest place to open a data center? Cushman & Wakefield just published its annual "Data Center Risk Index." This study analyzes factors, both favorable and unfavorable, to help make decisions about the locations of data centers in various countries.
Factors include energy costs, bandwidth, overall ease of doing business, corporate tax rates, labor costs, political stability, natural disasters, and population education levels.
According to the report, the U.S. "still has the highest internet bandwidth capacity of all the countries included in the index, the average cost of electricity has remained relatively low whilst most other countries have seen prices increase. […] Natural disasters remain the most significant risk to data centers, as we saw last year with hurricane Sandy in New York."
Here are the top 10 countries for locating a data center (only 30 countries were evaluated):