U.S. Maintains Hyperscale Data Center Lead

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When it comes to large data centers that pump out internet and cloud services, the U.S. continues to dominate the market, according to the latest study from Synergy Research Group.

There are nearly 400 hyperscale data centers dotting the globe, and 44 percent of them are located in the U.S.. And it doesn’t seem like the U.S. will be giving up its lead anytime soon.

Three years from now, the analyst firm predicts that the U.S. share of market will still hover around 40 percent, despite an expected wave of data center groundbreaking ceremonies and ribbon cuttings around the world.

“U.S. share is little changed from a year ago, despite a spate of data center openings around the world in 2017,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.

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“China, Japan, the UK, Australia and Germany are the next most popular locations, and together with the U.S. they account for nearly three quarters of the world total,” continued Dinsdale. China took second place with eight percent, followed by Japan (six percent), the U.K. (six percent), Australia (five percent) and Germany (five percent).

Synergy Research based its findings on 24 of the world’s major hyperscale data center operators. It’s a group that includes the social networks, internet search providers and e-commerce companies along with software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers.

On average, each manages 16 sites, but industry heavyweights have global data center footprints that put that figure to shame.

The top four cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google, each have 45 or more sites and run at least three data centers in each of the North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions.

“Google was particularly active in opening new data centers in 2017, while Amazon and Microsoft have a particularly strong pipeline of new sites to be opened,” noted Dinsdale. Oracle and Alibaba are also expanding their reach.

There’s no sign that these companies plan to slow down. Synergy Research is keeping tabs on 69 hyperscale data centers that are in the planning and building stages. By the time 2019 draws to a close, the firm expects that the total number of hyperscale data centers will cross the 500 milestone.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.