Where the Hyperscale Data Centers Are
The prevalence of US markets in the top 20 is mainly down to two factors.
Northern Virginia is home to 15% of the world’s hyperscale data center capacity – by far the highest percentage of the 20 locations worldwide that make up 62% of global capacity.
Beijing, China comes second, accounting for 7%, followed by Dublin, Ireland – approximately 4.5%, and the U.S. states of Oregon and Iowa. Shanghai comes in sixth, then 10 more U.S. states. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Singapore, and Germany round out the top of the list, each with a share of around 2% or less.
Europe and APAC countries account for the next 18% of hyperscale data center capacity. Up-and-coming entrants include Malaysia, India and Spain.
“The prevalence of US markets in the top twenty is mainly down to two factors – almost 60% of the world’s hyperscale operators are headquartered in the US, including the four biggest; and the US accounts for almost half of all cloud market revenues,” a new report from Synergy Research Group explained.
Its results are based on analysis of the data center footprint of 19 of the world’s major cloud and internet firms, “including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming.”
The report noted that the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – not only have huge footprints in the U.S. but also in other countries where they have multiple data centers. Together, they account for 60% of global hyperscale data center capacity.
“They are followed in the ranking by Meta/Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Apple, ByteDance and then other relatively smaller hyperscale operators,” the report noted.
Meanwhile, capacity worldwide is growing fast, it noted. The known pipeline includes 510 facilities, which are at various stages of being planned, developed or fitted out. “A range of factors influence the choice of location for hyperscale infrastructure, including proximity to customers, availability and cost of real estate, availability and cost of power, networking infrastructure, ease of doing business, local financial incentives, political stability, and minimizing the impact of natural hazards,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst. He said these requirements tend to favor sparsely populated states rather than economic hubs like New York or London.
Synergy predicted, however, that over time the mix of top markets will change as the result of high growth in emerging markets like those in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
