Federal courts open colocation rebid with Washington in the requirements

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has published a request for information covering colocation services across two geographically diverse data centers, a process that puts the federal judiciary's existing arrangement with Digital Realty and Csquare in play nearly three years before the current contract runs out.

The agency now operates out of a Digital Realty data center in El Segundo, California, and a Csquare facility in Ashburn, Virginia, under a contract managed by an undisclosed third-party vendor; the deal expires in July 2029, and the RFI asks for a contractor to keep both facilities fully operational under a new contract running until at least July 2032. It is also evaluating whether new data center locations should be considered, and on that point it is explicit: "Please note that AOUSC prefers one location to be near Washington, DC," the RFI states.

Today the split runs along the Mississippi River: circuit headquarters east of it — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Cincinnati, and Atlanta — take Ashburn as their primary data center, while western circuits in New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco route to San Diego. Bidders will want to reconcile one discrepancy, because the routing description places the western service point in San Diego while the Digital Realty facility the agency names sits in El Segundo, a gap that will help determine whether the 2029 rebid is a renewal or a relocation.

During the contract, the AOUSC expects to keep moving workloads to the cloud, primarily through Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, which makes the two colocation facilities less a growth mandate than a redundancy floor the judiciary intends to hold while its compute drifts upward. This publication has argued before that hyperscaler-anchored demand clears as infrastructure while everything else fights for capital; the courts' procurement is the federal version of that split, with Azure and AWS taking the growth and colocation absorbing the residual.

For bidders, the prize is a decade of sticky federal tenancy that begins only after the current deal expires in July 2029, a patient-money contract built for infrastructure owners with long horizons. For Digital Realty and Csquare, the sharper issue is that incumbency carries no presumption of renewal. The RFI's willingness to consider new locations, set against the stated preference for a Washington-area site, means the agency's own language has priced displacement as a live option, and a decade is long enough for a federal tenant to pick up and move.