Report: Hyperscale data center count reaches 541 with 176 more in the works

The growth of hyperscale data centers continues at a fast clip this year. According to Synergy Research Group, as of the middle of this year, there are 541 hyperscale data centers with another 176 in the pipeline. That number of data centers operated by hyperscale providers more than doubled the count from the middle of 2015, according to Synergy Research Group (SRG.)

The EMEA and Asia-Pac regions continued to have the highest growth rates, but the U.S. still accounted for 38% of the major cloud and internet data center sites.

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The next largest data center locations were China, Japan, the U.K., Germany and Australia, which collectively accounted for another 30% of the total. Over the last four quarters new data centers have opened their doors in 15 different countries, with the U.S., South Korea, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa and Bahrain having the largest number of additions.

“There were 100 new hyperscale data centers opened in the last eight quarters, with 26 of those being the first half of this year,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in a statement. “COVID-19 has caused some logistical issues but these are robust numbers, demonstrating the underlying strength of the services that are driving these investments. We have visibility of a further 176 data centers that are at various stages of planning or building, which is good news for data center hardware vendors and wholesale data center operators.”

Among the hyperscale operators, Amazon and Google opened the most new data centers over the last 12 months, accounting for over half of the total, with Microsoft and Oracle being the next most active companies. SRG's research showed that over 70% of all hyperscale data centers were located in facilities that are leased from data center operators or are owned by partners of the hyperscale operators.

Not surprisingly, the companies with the broadest data center footprints were 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—North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. SRG said that Oracle also had a notably broad data center presence while the remaining firms tended to have their data centers focused primarily in either the U.S. (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay) or China (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent.)

SRG's research was based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 20 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.