Synergy Research Group says that the number of large data centers that hyperscale service providers operate globally reached 700 by the end of this year’s third quarter. Just short of half of the capacity those facilities represent, measured by critical IT load, resides in the U.S., according to the market research firm.
The 49% market share for capacity operated in the U.S. represents a year’s long shrinkage, albeit one that has slowed to approximately 1% annually over the past few years, Synergy Research says. China and the rest of the Asia Pacific region account for 28% of hyperscale data center capacity, with China accounting for just over half of that at 15% of worldwide capacity share. EMEA (19%) and Canada/Latin America (4%) account for the rest.
Synergy Research notes that overall capacity is rising faster than the number of data centers constructed, thanks to the growing size of the average hyperscale data center. As a result, the number of data centers doubled over the past five years, while data center capacity has doubled in less than four.
The market research firm’s figures cover the data center footprint of 19 major cloud and internet service firms, including those that offer SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce, and gaming. Not surprisingly, the companies with biggest data center footprints are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM; each has 60 or more data center locations with at least three in each of North America, APAC, EMEA, and Latin America. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, lead in data center capacity. However, Chinese hyperscalers are growing the fastest, most notably ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, according to Synergy Research.
“While the number of hyperscale data centers continues to grow at an impressive pace, not all data centers are born equal,” commented John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research. “Generally speaking, self-owned data centers are much bigger than leased data centers and data centers in the home country of a hyperscale company are much bigger than its international facilities, though there are plenty of exceptions to these trends. The constants in all of this are that both the number and average size of hyperscale data centers continue to grow steadily. We also see a very healthy pipeline of hyperscale data centers being planned, developed, or fitted out, supporting our strong five-year growth forecasts.”
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