Pipeline of Over 300 New Hyperscale Data Centers Drives Healthy Growth Forecasts

RENO, NV, March 23, 2022

Synergy’s new hyperscale forecasts show continued rapid growth in the number of large data centers to be used by hyperscale operators in order to support their ever-expanding business operations. With a current known pipeline of 314 future new hyperscale data centers, the installed base of operational data centers will pass the 1,000 mark in three years’ time and continue growing rapidly thereafter. The United States currently accounts for almost 40% of operational hyperscale data centers and half of all worldwide capacity. By a wide margin, it is also the country with the most data centers in the future pipeline, followed by China, Ireland, India, Spain, Israel, Canada, Italy, Australia and the UK. As the installed base of operational data centers continues to grow each year at double-digit percentage rates, the capacity of those data centers will grow even more rapidly as the average size increases and older facilities are expanded. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint and plans of 19 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. Currently, the companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 60 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent also have a notably broad data center presence. By data center capacity the leading companies are Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, though it is the Chinese hyperscalers that are growing the fastest, most notably ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. The companies that feature most heavily in the future new data center pipeline are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

“The future looks bright for hyperscale operators, with double-digit annual growth in total revenues supported in large part by cloud revenues that will be growing in the 20-30% per year range. This in turn will drive strong growth in capex generally and in data center spending specifically,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “While we see the geographic distribution, build-versus-lease distribution, average data center size and spending mix by data center component all continuing to evolve, we predict continued rapid growth throughout the hyperscale data center ecosystem. Companies who can successfully target that ecosystem with their product offerings have plenty of reasons for optimism.”

Synergy’s Hyperscale Market Tracker research service provides key data and metrics on 19 companies that meet Synergy’s hyperscale definition criteria. The data includes information on the hyperscale data center footprint, a full data center listing, analysis of critical IT load, future data center pipeline, hyperscale operator capex, hyperscale data center spending, company revenues, and five-year forecasts for the key metrics.