Synergy Updates Its Ranking of the World’s Top 20 Hyperscale Data Center Locations

RENO, NV, July 16, 2025

New data from Synergy shows that just twenty state or metro markets account for 62% of the world’s current hyperscale data center capacity. Northern Virginia and the Greater Beijing Area alone make up 20% of the total. They are followed by the US states of Oregon and Iowa, Dublin, the US state of Ohio, Dallas, and then Shanghai. Of the top 20 markets, 14 are in the US, five in the APAC region and just one is in Europe. After the top 20, the next twenty largest state or metro markets account for another 17% of the market, with markets outside of the US featuring more prominently in that batch. Amsterdam and Frankfurt used to be in the top 20 but recently slipped outside of that ranking. The prevalence of US markets in the top twenty is mainly down to two factors – 60% of the world’s hyperscale operators are headquartered in the US, including the four biggest; and the US accounts for almost half of all cloud market revenues in several key segments. Looking ahead, the US and China will continue to dominate the numbers, though several up-and-coming tier two markets will start to feature more prominently. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In addition to a huge data center footprint in their home US market, each also has multiple data centers in many other countries around the world. In aggregate the three now account for 58% of all hyperscale data center capacity. They are followed in the ranking by Meta/Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Apple, ByteDance and then other relatively smaller hyperscale operators. Synergy’s forecast growth numbers are based in large part on its tracking of hyperscale operators’ pipeline of future data centers. Synergy’s known pipeline of future hyperscale data centers currently stands at 535 facilities, which are at various stages of being planned, developed or fitted out.

“A range of factors influence the choice of location for hyperscale infrastructure, including proximity to customers, availability and cost of real estate, availability and cost of power, networking infrastructure, ease of doing business, local financial incentives, political stability, and minimizing the impact of natural hazards. With the extremely rapid growth in demand for AI technology and infrastructure, availability of power has become an ever more critical criteria,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “These factors tend to mitigate against some of the world’s biggest economic hubs, like London, New York and Frankfurt, while favoring some sparsely populated US states like Oregon, Iowa and Nebraska. While our forecasts show that Northern Virginia will remain by far the largest market for hyperscale infrastructure in the US, the center of gravity will shift more towards locations in the South and Midwest regions. Outside of the US, countries who will increase their share of the market include India, Australia, Malaysia, Spain, and Saudi Arabia.”