According to new statistics from Synergy Research Group, the total number of hyperscale data centers has more than quadrupled since mid-2016 to 659 at the end of the second quarter of 2021. When it comes to data center locations, the United States and China continue to dominate.
A further 25 percent of the total hyperscale data center count globally is accounted for by the following countries: Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and India.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively account for over half of the data center footprint, but three Chinese businesses stand out in terms of data center growth rate over the previous four quarters – ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were the largest spenders in the second quarter, with Facebook, Apple, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent following closely behind.
“The growth of hyperscale data centers is pretty much on a straight line trajectory, with an average of 16 new data centers coming on line every quarter over the last three years,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “On top of that new data center build, the hyperscale operators are also adding capacity at existing facilities and are regularly ripping out and replacing server hardware that has reached the end of its operational lifespan. That all adds up to huge and growing quarterly investments in data centers. The big five US hyperscalers still lead in terms of quarterly data center spending, but the Chinese hyperscalers are growing rapidly with ByteDance being particularly noteworthy. It has come from almost nowhere over the last three years but is now ranked seventh in data center spending, well ahead of many industry giants.”
Industry Giants – Data Center Presence
Synergy’s research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 19 of the world’s major cloud and Internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming.
Companies with the largest data center footprints include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM, who are all prominent cloud providers. As a result, each company has at least 60 data centers spread throughout the globe, with at least three in each of the four areas – North America; APAC; EMEA; as well as Latin America.
In addition, Oracle, Alibaba, and Tencent have a large number of data centers. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Baidu, JD.co) and Baidu, JD.com have data centers in the United States and China, respectively.
