Cloud Computing Drives Growth in New HyperScale Data Centers Globally

Major hyperscale providers have started operating number of new large datacenters rose to 430 by year end of 2018. This is an increase in 11% in new data centers in 2018 according to data compiled by Synergy Research Group.

The research findings are based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms. These firms are the largest operators in SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), search, social networking, e-commerce, and gaming etc.

The hyperscale data center operators including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM are the major cloud providers leading with broadest data center footprint. Each of these major cloud providers has 55 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions viz. North America, APAC, EMEA, and Latin America. Alibaba and Oracle also have a notably broad data center presence.

Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo have their data centers primarily focused in the United State.  Baidu, Tencent have their data centers primarily focused in China.

In 2018, new data centers were opened in 17 different countries. The United States and Hong Kong noticed the highest number of additions of new data centers. The United States accounts for 40% of the major cloud and internet data center sites while the Asia-Pac and EMEA regions are the prominent regions where new data centers were opened in 2018. Together countries like China, Japan, the UK, Australia, and Germany account for 30% of new data centers.


Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group, John Dinsdale, said, “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. In addition to the 430 current hyperscale data centers we have visibility of a further 132 that are at various stages of planning or building. There is no end in sight to the data center building boom.”

The hyperscale operators, Amazon, and Google account for more than half of the opened new data centers in 2018 On an average, each of the 20 firms analyzed had 22 data center sites each.