A new study by US real estate specialist, Grubb & Ellis, has identified a pending shortage of data center space in the US. According to this report by DataCenterKnowledge, the situation is becoming critical for companies with large requirements.

Jim Kerrigan, director at Grubb & Ellis’ National Data Center Group says there’s only six sites in the US right now that can support 7 megawatts of power or more than 50,000 square feet of contiguous space. Kerrigan and Grubb & Ellis should know too. The company is a major real estate consultant, advisory, brokerage service providers with offices across the US and it is its business to know when people are looking for particular types of real estate, or have rental capacity available.

With the US government’s recent announcement that it wants to adopt cloud services, and the global credit crunch delaying new builds, the situation is so bad that companies should book space now before they are all gone.

“It is imperative that users pay closer attention to ramping/expansion as they determine how much space/power that they will ultimately need,” writes Kerrigan in a research note. “There is likely to be an increase in demand from industries that are newer to data center space (digital television and healthcare companies) and from businesses currently housed in antiquated space. In addition, numerous financial institutions have entered the market for large disaster-recovery solutions throughout the country.”

Which brings me to Iceland. As we reported way back in April last year, the Icelandic government’s Invest in Iceland Agency is attempting to entice data center operators to build facilities on the island nation, citing plenty of cheap, clean energy, as well as a multitude of other merits such as available skill set, sufficient bandwidth, and not that much latency considering that it is not that far off from the east coast of the US.

Given the upcoming shortage of data center capacity in the US, Iceland just might have a point. At the same time, the trend might accelerate the development of other new concepts, like Google’s patent for floating data centers build using ready-made containers full of servers, which enable the deployment of data center capacity quickly and without barriers such as land leases, permits and so on. After all, there’s no better time for innovation than during times of crisis.