US, China Account for 54% of Major Cloud, Internet Data Centers

According to Q2 data from Synergy Research Group, the United States now accounts for 44% of major cloud and Internet data center sites, followed by China which accounts for 10%. The two leading countries are then followed by Australia, the UK, Japan, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands, each of which accounts for 4-5% of the total. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 13 of the world's major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking and e-commerce. In aggregate, the companies now have almost 150 major data center sites.

On average, each of the 13 firms had 11 data center sites. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading hyperscale cloud providers - AWS, IBM and Microsoft. Each has 20 or more data center locations with at least one in each of the four regions - North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Google, Oracle and Rackspace also have a notably broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the United States (Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo) or China (Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba).

"The country distribution of major data centers clearly reflects two things - the U.S. dominance of cloud and internet technologies; and the scale and unique characteristics of the Chinese market," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. "The ranking also reflects the relative importance of smaller countries that are often used as regional hubs - Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands and Ireland. Until recently, India was an omission from the list, but Microsoft has just opened its first major cloud data centers in the country, and both AWS and IBM will soon be following suit."