Cyxtera just opened its second data center location in the Phoenix area.

The data center and colocation provider welcomed employees and partners to the grand opening of its office in Tempe, Arizona. The “PHX2” location joins Cyxtera’s other data center in Arizona, which is located within the Iron Mountain facility.

Chief marketing officer Simon West said partners will enjoy on-demand plug-and-play and colocation capacity. Around 20 carriers and network providers are working with Cyxtera in the region. West called Cyxtera a carrier-neutral provider.

“We believe in network density,” West said at the welcoming ceremony last week. “We believe in bringing tier 1 carriers to the facility as well as attracting cloud on-ramps and cloud direct connects and the latest generation of software-defined WAN providers, to make sure that customers within our facilities who need to get to public cloud are just a few hops away.”

Cyxtera emerged following the sale of CenturyLink’s data centers to a consortium of investors in 2017. The company announced in March that it was expanding data center operations in Phoenix, Silicon Valley, New York Metro and Toronto.

Cyxtera launched its Extensible Data Center (CXD) platform last year and said it would expand the platform into new markets. The CXD computer nodes let users “dynamically configure connectivity and dedicated hyperconverged infrastructure on demand” via a web portal, according to Weiss.

Randy Rowland, Cyxtera’s president of data center services, said colocation is enjoying increased popularity for its ability to reduce cost and use modern infrastructure “without sacrificing control or security.”

“In addition, increased demand for cloud and hybrid services is driving service providers to consume our data center capacity. Our expansions enable us to meet growing customer demand in these key markets,” Rowland said. “We’re also pleased to continue to expand our CXD platform to more markets to meet demand for this innovative on-demand offering.”

Cyxtera owns more than 50 data centers and is a member of our 20 Top Colocation Providers list.

Phoenix is a hot spot for data centers, owing to the growing economy and stable (although hot) weather conditions. SAP built an office in Tempe in 2016 to host more than 300 employees and PlanetOne this March launched a bigger-and-better office in Scottsdale.

We visited Cyxtera’s ribbon-cutting ceremony last week. Scroll through the pictures below to see what you missed.