Tech company HostDime building $100M data center in Eatonville

EATONVILLE, Fla. - A new building is going up along Interstate 4 in Eatonville that is getting lots of attention. Its unique shape, layout, and color certainly turn heads along the busy interstate.  But since there is no signage yet, most people have no idea what is going on inside that unique structure.  And in a nutshell, it's the cloud.

HostDime, a company specializing in global data center, is building its new headquarters about a mile north of Lee Road on a parcel of property that has been vacant for years.  Manny Vivar, the CEO of HostDime says this project is upwards of $100 million, with about $45 million on construction and more than $50 million in equipment.  

"It's actually a tier four data center," Vivar tells FOX 35 News. "There are currently only five Tier 4 data centers in the whole United States right now" he adds.  "It's basically where the cloud lives.  An ecosystem of these facilities all around the world is what powers, and what we consume right now, as the modern-day cloud."

This simply means that if you host a website or watch videos on YouTube, many of them are actually stored in the massive computers lining the facility.  And Vivar says as the web continues to grow, there is a big demand for these hosting sites to localize. 

"With the fast-moving data online latency matters, gaming matters, and having this facility in central Florida will allow everybody to benefit from that because you will have the data localized. You don't have the backhaul anymore from Miami or Atlanta."

The "cloud" will be based in the rear of the building which is all concreted and able to withstand almost any storm possible, which is important when you are hosting this much data. The rest of the building that you can see from the road is the office space and a "floating sport court." Yes, a sports court high above the ground will allow employees to decompress by playing basketball, pickleball, and other sports right on site.  Because, as Vivar states, a happy employee is a good employee.  

"Well, health is wealth.  We constantly sit on our computers. We're not staying active. We're getting older. This allows our staff to basically have a place to stay active."

On the top floor will be a conference center, with an open-air space, that caters to tech companies and other corporate events in Central Florida. 

"So, it's basically an indoor-outdoor event space for up to 350 people," Vivar states.  "The whole vision behind that is to have all tech-related conferences in the facility." 

He says as Central Florida grows as a tech hub, a space like this is definitely needed. "And I think that brings two worlds together a physical and a virtual workspace combined."

Vivar says that construction should be completed by August and the facility will be operational in September or October.  He beams when he says that many of the people working in the building are from Orlando and went to the University of Central Florida, which he calls one of the top-tier tech universities in the country.   

He says that 80% of his workforce are either current UCF students or graduates, and he only expects the synergy between the two to grow once the massive structure is complete.