There's no question that hyperscale service providers have an insatiable appetite for data centers, which was borne out in a recent report.
According to Synergy Research Group, the number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers increased by 11% last year to reach a total of 430. Not surprisingly, Amazon and Google opened the most new data centers last year. Together, they accounted for more than half of the new data centers.
Last month, Google announced it was expanding its presence beyond Silicon Valley by investing more than $1 billion to establish a new campus in New York City. Meanwhile, Amazon announced in November that it would build new locations in New York City and northern Virginia.
Despite robust data center growth in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions, the U.S. accounted for 40% of the of the new cloud and internet data center sites. Following the U.S., the next most popular site locations were in China, Japan, the U.K., Australia, and Germany, all of which accounted for 30% of the total, according to Synergy Research. Last year, the U.S. and Hong Kong had the largest number of new data centers.
While the report didn't detail specific areas for data center that serve the hyperscale providers, Ashburn, Virgina, and Montreal are among the most prominent.
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The data center research is based on Synergy Research's analysis of the data center footprint of 20 of the world's major cloud and internet organizations including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming.
On average, each of the 20 firms had 22 data center sites. The companies with the biggest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 55 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions—North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.
Alibaba and Oracle also have a broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the U.S.—Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay and Yahoo—or China, including Baidu and Tencent.
“Hyperscale growth goes on unabated, with company revenues growing by an average 24% per year and their capex growing by over 40%—much of which is going into building and equipping data centers,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a prepared statement. “In addition to the 430 current hyperscale data centers we have visibility of a further 132 that are at various stages of planning or building. There is no end in sight to the data center building boom.”