When it comes to tallying up the owners of hyperscale data centers, Amazon, Microsoft and Google account for over half of them, according to a report.
According to Synergy Research Group's latest data, the total number of large data centers owned by hyperscale providers increased to 597 by the end of last year, which was double the number of data centers in 2015.
Over the past 12 months, Amazon and Google opened the doors on the most data centers while also accounting for half of the new data centers in 2020. Synergy Research Group (SRG) noted Oracle, Microsoft, Alibaba and Facebook were also particularly active.
“There were 111 new hyperscale data centers opened in the last eight quarters, with 52 of those coming onstream in 2020 despite COVID-19 causing a few logistical issues,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at SRG, in a statement. “That is testament to the ongoing robust growth in the digital services that are driving those investments – particularly cloud computing, SaaS, e-commerce, gaming and video services.
"We did actually see a handful of older hyperscale data centers shut down in 2020, but those numbers pale besides the number of newly opened or planned sites. In addition to almost 600 operational data centers, we have visibility of a further 219 that are at various stages of planning or building, which is good news indeed for data center hardware vendors and wholesale data center operators.”
The U.S. continued to lead the way by accounting for almost 40% of the major cloud and internet data center sites. The next most popular countries were China, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and Australia, which collectively accounted for another 29% of the total.
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Over the last four quarters new data centers were opened in 17 different countries, with the U.S., South Korea, China, Canada, UAE, Indonesia, Italy and South Africa having the most.
Not surprisingly, the companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 60 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions of North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.
Oracle and Alibaba also have a broad data center presence, according to SRG. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the U.S. (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay) or China (Tencent, Baidu, and JD.com).
