· The number of hyperscale data centres now stands at 700 worldwide
· It represents a doubling in five years, but data centre capacity has doubled in less than four
· Nearly half of that capacity can be found in the US, way ahead of China and EMEA, finds Synergy Research
Research published this week shows hyperscalers have been working overtime to ensure that cloud capacity is capable of satisfying surging demand.
Fresh figures from Synergy Research reveal hyperscale data centre capacity has doubled in less than four years. Interestingly, it took five years for them to double the physical number of data centres in their collective footprint. This suggests that newer data centres are also larger data centres, and/or that existing sites are being expanded to offer greater capacity, and that new storage and compute technology is giving data centre operators more bang for their buck.
Synergy puts the number of large data centres operated by hyperscale providers at 700 by the end of the third quarter, up from 573 a year ago. The demand for all this extra capacity is certainly in evidence. Figures from Synergy in October showed that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $45.4 billion in the third quarter, up 37 percent year-on-year. Amazon, Microsoft and Google trousered 63 percent of that sum.
"Ranked by critical IT load, the leading hyperscale companies are Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, though it is the Chinese hyperscalers that are growing the fastest, most notably ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, in a research note on Wednesday.
"With the four largest hyperscale operators all being headquartered in the US, one result is that the US is currently home to almost half (49 percent) of the world's hyperscale data centre capacity," he noted.
EMEA is the next largest region, accounting for 19 percent, followed by China with 15 percent.