US Rises Again as Synergy Updates Its Ranking of Hyperscale Data Center Locations

RENO, Nev., Aug. 19, 2026 – Synergy Research Group, now part of TechInsights, has updated its analysis of the world’s leading locations for hyperscale data center infrastructure. It shows that just twenty state or metro markets account for 60% of the world’s current hyperscale data center capacity. Northern Virginia in the US and the Greater Beijing Area of China alone make up 17% of the total. They are followed by the US states of Oregon, Iowa, and Ohio, the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, Dublin, Ireland, and Shanghai, China. Of the top 20 markets, 15 are in the US, four in the APAC region and just one is in Europe. After the top 20, the next 20 largest state or metro markets account for another 19% of the market, with markets outside of the US featuring more prominently in that group.

Notably, there are now just five non-US locations in the top twenty, compared with six a year ago and seven two years ago. Since last year, Tokyo, Japan, Sydney, Australia, and South Carolina have dropped out of the top twenty, being replaced by Indiana and Tennessee in the US, and Guangdong, China. The prevalence of US markets in the top twenty is mainly down to two factors – 62% 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. “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,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “With the extremely rapid growth in demand for AI technology and infrastructure, availability of power has become an ever more critical criterion, as has the ability to overcome or work around local community objections to building large data centers. These factors are heavily influencing the geographic distribution of future infrastructure developments.”

Dinsdale continued, “Markets like Dublin, Amsterdam and Singapore have dropped down the rankings over the last two years due to local constraints, and even Northern Virginia is not featuring as highly in new plans as it once did. Meanwhile, one of the biggest growth stories is Texas, whose operational hyperscale capacity has grown by 71% over the last year, compared with a worldwide average growth rate of 36%. Other high-growth markets include Indiana, Tennessee and South Virginia in the US, Shanghai, China, Johor, Malaysia and Jakarta, Indonesia. Our pipeline tracking of future hyperscale data centers shows that the ranking of locations will continue to shift over the coming years.”

The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 21 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social media, 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 worldwide. In aggregate, the three now account for 57% of all hyperscale data center capacity. They are followed by Meta, Alibaba, Tencent, Oracle, Apple, ByteDance, CoreWeave, and then other relatively smaller hyperscale operators. Synergy’s forecast growth numbers are based largely on its tracking of hyperscale operators’ pipeline of future data centers. Synergy’s known pipeline of future hyperscale data centers currently stands at 915 facilities at various stages of planning, development, or fit-out.