IT and communications services provider EarthLink announced a plan to expand its core fiber IP network and add four data centers to its portfolio to support the launch of its cloud hosting platform.

The company is planning to expand into data centers in San Jose, California, Chicago, Dallas and South Florida over the course of 2013. It said it would lease space from commercial data center providers.

EarthLink VP of products and marketing Michael Toplisek said the firm wanted to capitalize on companies’ growing IT needs, as they virtualize and try to decrease the cost of their infrastructure.

“Beyond cloud hosting, in conjunction with our IP and fiber network expansion, EarthLink is poised to deliver disaster recovery and business continuity solutions that are mission-critical to businesses in all industries,” he said.

EarthLink is currently installing its cloud infrastructure at its existing data center in Rochester, New York. This is an integrated computing-and-storage platform.

With data centers dispersed geographically, the company wants to cater to enterprises that need fault-tolerant data center infrastructure. Once the expansion project is complete, EarthLink will have eight data centers linked to its IP network.

It is expanding the fiber network to interconnect the much larger data center footprint. The company is adding new optical-transport capabilities to links between Miami and Virginia and increasing capacity in Ashburn, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando.

It is also extending its network into Texas, adding locations in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston.

New capacity will enable EarthLink to offer native 100Gigabit transport services across its entire fiber footprint.