Hyperscale Data Center Count Approaches The 400 Mark
The U.S. still dominates.
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers is rapidly approaching the 400 mark. The year-end total will be over 390, after Q4 data center openings in China, India, and Malaysia. The mid-year period saw a flurry of openings in Germany, the UK, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, and the US, with Google being particularly active. One notable feature of the global footprint is that despite a major ongoing push to locate new operations in countries around the world, the US still accounts for 44% of major cloud and internet data center sites.
The next most prominent locations are China, Japan, and the UK, which collectively account for another 20% of the total. The four leading countries are then followed by Australia, Germany, Singapore, Canada, India, and Brazil, each of which accounts for 3-5% of the total. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 24 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking and e-commerce. \On average each of the 24 firms had 16 data center sites. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers — Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Each has 45 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions — North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Oracle and Alibaba also have a notably broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the U.S. (Apple, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Yahoo) or China (Tencent, Baidu).