According to new Q2 statistics from Synergy Research Group, the top six colocation providers control 37% of the global market. A very large list of medium to small data center operators makes up 50% of the industry, while Chinese operators account for another 13% because they essentially control their home market.
Equinix, Digital Realty, and NTT are the industry leaders when it comes to data center colocation. Along with their numerous joint ventures, they currently account for 30% of all colocation sales. They are followed by CyrusOne, the consortium of firms known as DigitalBridge, and KDDI.
China Telecom, GDS, and VNET are the three biggest Chinese telecom companies. The top-performing next-tier colocation companies include STACK Infrastructure, Mapletree, Chindata, Iron Mountain, Switch, and H5 Data Centers. Nearly half of the global market is accounted for by the U.S. and China. Following them come Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, and India, which together account for another 24% of the total.
According to Synergy Research, the major data center colocation markets in China, Brazil, India, and Singapore are expanding at the fastest rates.
Colocation Market Continues to Grow Steadily
The entire worldwide colocation revenues over the previous four quarters came to $47 billion. The underlying market is still growing at a double-digit rate even after taking recent exchange rate changes into account. Retail colocation continues to dominate the industry in terms of segmentation, but wholesale revenues are expanding considerably more quickly, in large part because hyperscale operators are leasing significant quantities of capacity.
“The colocation market continues to grow at a healthy pace, driven by large cloud and Internet companies needing ever more data center capacity, and by enterprises pushing increasing amounts of IT infrastructure off premise and into multi-tenant data centers. Given the long-term nature of leasing arrangements, we confidently forecast strong continued growth over the coming years,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “The competitive landscape is a mixture of a small number of companies who are building a global footprint and a large number of national or regional specialists. Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT continue to expand globally by a combination of organic growth and by some aggressive M&A activity, but theirs is not the only path forward. Smaller data center colocation companies can also build growing and sustainable operations by focusing on specific countries or geographic regions.”
