Northern Virginia: Roblox Constructs Ashburn Data Center and Edge Facilities for $400m

Roblox, a maker of video games, invested hundreds of millions of dollars on data center and edge infrastructure in 2022 to serve its own gaming platform. Roblox reported earnings that were higher than forecasted and a rising user base, which caused the company's shares to increase by 25%. Roblox runs its own colocation data center infrastructure to serve its platform, which enables users to develop and upload their own games within the larger game. According to company CFO Mike Guthrie, they invested more than $400 million in infrastructure during the year, mostly for its data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The facility is probably the data center Roblox promised to build in January 2022 after a 73-hour downtime cost the business $25 million in missed reservations. 

Roblox also runs edge Points-of-Presence (PoPs) installations in addition to massive data center deployments. As they build out additional Edge data centers, according to CEO David Baszucki, they are continually enhancing the performance of all of their applications, the speed at which users can connect to Roblox experiences, the performance of their cloud globally, and the performance globally. While Uber announced this week that it will go to the cloud, Roblox is still dedicated to building its own infrastructure. The company does employ a public cloud when it is more practical to do so, such as when computes are overloaded. CFO Guthrie stated that Roblox anticipates expenses to be 25 to 35 percent lower this year after completing the infrastructure in 2023.