Much of the hyperscale CAPEX goes towards building and expanding huge data centers.
New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the CAPEX of hyperscale operators was up 59% from a year ago, maintaining a record-setting start to the year. CAPEX in the first half topped $53 billion, compared with $31 billion in the first half of 2017. Q2 CAPEX would have been comfortably the highest ever had it not been for Google's purchase of Manhattan’s Chelsea Market building in March, which gave the Q1 numbers a $2.4 billion boost. While the relative ranking moves around each quarter, for the last ten quarters the top five group of spenders has always consisted of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, which in aggregate account for well over 70% of hyperscale CAPEX. It is notable that CAPEX levels at three of the big five were at an all-time high in Q2.
Much of the hyperscale CAPEX goes towards building and expanding huge data centers, which have now grown in number to 420. The research is based on analysis of the CAPEX and data center footprint of 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking, and e-commerce. Outside of the top five, other leading hyperscale spenders in Q2 included Alibaba, Baidu, IBM, JD.com, NTT, Oracle, SAP and Tencent.