The News-Press and Gazette Company (NPG), a media company based in the Midwest region of the US, has entered the date center business by investing in data center properties in second-tier US markets.

In addition to having built two data centers from scratch in St. Joseph, Missouri, NPG invested US$20m in Online Tech, a provider of colocation and hosting services with three data centers in Ann Arbor and Flint, Michigan. Money in hand, Online Tech announced plans to build four more data centers over the next 24 months.

With primary US data center markets like the Silicon Valley, New York metro or Chicago metro dominated by the big established providers, competition is now heating up for share of the second-tier markets that have been underserved by the large players. Some start-ups have formed to enter these markets, and many mergers by regional players in such markets have taken place to take advantage of the opportunity.

Until it invested in the data center properties, NPG was solely a media company, owning 40 broadcast-television and four radio stations in addition to 14 newspapers.

It invested about $2m in construction of its two data centers in St. Joseph. These data centers will operate as Echo Cloud Solutions, a company NPG formed in April.

Echo Cloud Solutions will work in partnership with Online Tech.

Jeff Penland, director of cloud services at NPG, said the partnership with Online Tech opened doors to a much bigger market for Echo. “We can now provide data services to a range of customers that we couldn’t have reached through Echo alone,” he said.

Online Tech’s data centers in Michigan provide a total of $60,000 sq ft of data center space. The company has placed a focus on the financial and healthcare markets, having put its cloud solutions through audits for HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and PCI (Payment Card Industry) data-security compliance.

It also has cloud solutions for retail and e-commerce customers.