The number of large data centres operated by hyperscale providers increased by 11 per cent in 2018, spearheaded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and IBM.
In reaching 430 by year end, new data from Synergy Research highlights Asia Pacific as an expanding market of growth, featuring most prominently in terms of new data centres that were opened.
Despite such growth however, the US still accounts for 40 per cent of the major cloud and internet data centre sites.
The next most popular locations are China, Japan, the UK, Australia and Germany, which collectively account for another 30 per cent of the total.
“Hyperscale growth goes on unabated, with company revenues growing by an average 24 per cent per year and their capex growing by over 40 per cent - much of which is going into building and equipping data centres,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
During the past 12 months, Dinsdale said new data centres were opened in 17 different countries with the US and Hong Kong having the largest number of additions.
Credit: Synergy Research Group Among the hyperscale operators, AWS and Google opened the most new data centres in 2018, together accounting for over half of the total.
According to Dinsdale, the research spans the largest operators in software-as-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), in addition to search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming.
“In addition to the 430 current hyperscale data centres we have visibility of a further 132 that are at various stages of planning or building,” Dinsdale added. “There is no end in sight to the data centre building boom.”
On average, Dinsdale said each of the 20 operators studied had 22 data centre sites on average.
Within the context of cloud, AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM each has 55 or more data centre locations with at least three in each of the four regions, covering North America, Asia Pacific, EMEA and Latin America.
“Alibaba and Oracle also have a notably broad data centre presence,” Dinsdale explained. “The remaining firms tend to have their data centres focused primarily in either the US (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo) or China (Baidu, Tencent).”
