Synergy Research Group (SRG) estimates that the number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers rose by 11% in 2018.
In 2018 the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions featured most prominently in terms of new data centers that were opened, but despite that the US still accounts for 40% of the major cloud and internet data center sites. The next most popular locations are China, Japan, the UK, Australia and Germany, which collectively account for another 30% of the total.
During 2018 new data centers were opened in 17 different countries with the US and Hong Kong having the largest number of additions.
Among the hyperscale operators, Amazon and Google opened the most new data centers in 2018, together accounting for over half of the total.
On average each of the 20 firms had 22 data center sites. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 55 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.
Alibaba and Oracle also have a notably broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the US (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo) or China (Baidu, Tencent).
Figure 1: Hyperscale data center locations by country, 2018
Source: Synergy Research Group
“Hyperscale growth goes on unabated, with company revenues growing by an average 24% per year and their capex growing by over 40% - much of which is going into building and equipping data centers,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.
He noted that in addition to the 430 current hyperscale data centers now in operation, an additional 132 are at various stages of planning or building. “There is no end in sight to the data center building boom,” concluded Dinsdale.