There is a continued rapid growth in the number of large data centres by hyperscale operators in order to support their ever-expanding business operations.
With a current known pipeline of 314 future new hyperscale data centres, the installed base of operational data centres will pass the 1,000 mark in three years’ time and continue growing rapidly thereafter, Synergy’s new hyperscale forecasts show. The United States currently accounts for almost 40 per cent of operational hyperscale data centres and half of all worldwide capacity.
Growth & growth…
The research is based on an analysis of the data centres footprint and plans of 19 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. By a wide margin, the US is also the country with the most data centres in the future pipeline, followed by China, Ireland, India, Spain, Israel, Canada, Italy, Australia and the UK.
As the installed base of operational data centres continues to grow each year at double-digit percentage rates, the capacity of those data centres will grow even more rapidly as the average size increases and older facilities are expanded. John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group said:
The future looks bright for hyperscale operators, with double-digit annual growth in total revenues supported in large part by cloud revenues that will be growing in the 20-30 per cent per year range. This in turn will drive strong growth in capex generally and in data centre spending specifically. While we see the geographic distribution, build-versus-lease distribution, average data centres size and spending mix by data centres component all continuing to evolve, we predict continued rapid growth throughout the hyperscale data centre ecosystem. Companies who can successfully target that ecosystem with their product offerings have plenty of reasons for optimism.
Currently, the companies with the broadest data centres footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 60 or more data centres locations with at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent also have a notably broad data centres presence.
By data centre capacity the leading companies are Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, though it is the Chinese hyperscalers that are growing the fastest, most notably ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. The companies that feature most heavily in the future new data centres pipeline are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.