- The number of hyperscale data centers has boomed in recent years, nearly doubling since the end of 2019
- Hundreds more facilities are in the pipeline
- The U.S. continues to be a focal point for construction
We already told you cloud hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are planning to spend more than $315 billion in 2025 expanding their data center footprints across the globe. But what does that translate to in terms of the number of actual campuses? And where exactly are these facilities being built?
Cue Synergy Research Group to the rescue. We sifted through their research and compiled a series of charts to help visualize what’s happening in the data center arena.
In its most recent report, Synergy noted the number of data centers operated by hyperscalers hit 1,136 at the end of 2024. That figure was up from less than 600 in Q4 2019, meaning the number of hyperscale data centers globally has nearly doubled over the past five years.
And plenty more are on the way. According to Synergy’s tally, the number of known data center projects in the pipeline for the coming years has jumped 60% since March 2022, rising from 314 to 504 as of March 2025.
These facilities aren’t the one-building 10MW data centers of years past, either. Hyperscalers are now buying up hundreds of acres at a time to build sprawling multi-building 100MW+ campuses. The increased size of new data center builds has implications for compute capacity.
“In large part driven by AI, the average size of newly opened data centers has increased recently and will continue to increase, meaning that total hyperscale data center capacity increases even more rapidly than the data center count,” Synergy’s Chief Analyst John Dinsdale said in an email.
There’s good reason hyperscalers are hustling to bring new facilities online. As McKinsey noted in a recent report, “our analysis of current trends suggests that global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of between 19 and 22 percent from 2023 to 2030 to reach an annual demand of 171 to 219 gigawatts (GW)…This contrasts with the current demand of 60 GW, raising the potential for a significant supply deficit.”
But what about location? Well, it seems that the U.S. continues to be a focal point for expansion.
While the percentage of hyperscale data centers in China, the rest of APAC and the rest of the world remained flat from year-end 2023 to year-end 2024, the percentage located in the U.S. grew 3 percentage points. In contrast, Europe saw its percentage drop from 17% to 15% in the same period.
Will the trend continue? We'll be watching closely.