Companies have added a lot of data center capacity in Norht America over the past two years and the next two years will see an even higher rate of growth.

New York City and New Jersey topped the short list of most popular locations where firms are planning to add capacity in 2012 and 2013, according to the latest annual data center demand survey funded by Digital Realty Trust.

Digital CEO Michael Foust said reasons behind this demand were manifold.

“These include the continued adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions, pent up demand from enterprise customers that had deferred expansion plans in previous years due to economic uncertainty, an improved economic outlook, and the proliferation of data requiring appropriate computing and storage environments,” he explained.

Digital Realty Trust is presenting at the DatacenterDynamics conference in New York City on 13th March.

Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco Bay Area and Phoenix joined New York on the list of North America’s most popular destinations for data center expansion, according to results of the survey. In descending order, these are locations most frequently cited by survey respondents with expansion plans.

More than 90% of all survey participants said they planned to add data center capacity in 2012. This is the highest percentage since Digital first sponsored this survey six years ago. In last year’s survey, 70% of respondents indicated that they had built or acquired a data center in the preceding 24 months.

Of the companies with definite or indefinite plans to expand this year, 92% plan to expand in the US, about half also plan to expand in Europe or Asia pacific. Companies with South American projects in the works constituted 21% of the respondents.