Hyperscale data centre count will hit 500 by 2019, says Synergy Research

The number of large data centres operated by hyperscale providers is rapidly approaching the 400 mark, and will reach 500 within the next few years, according to the latest report from market intelligence firm Synergy Research Group.

The mid-year period saw a flurry of new data centre openings in Germany, the UK, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and the US, with Google being particularly active. The search engine giant started out with six cloud platform regions, and ended the year with 13, adding Northern Virginia, Singapore, Sydney, London, Germany, Sao Paolo and Mumbai.

“Hyperscale growth goes on unabated and we already have visibility of at least 69 more hyperscale data centres that are at various stages of planning or building. We will pass the 500 milestone before the end of 2019,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.

Despite a major push to locate new operations closer to end users in countries around the world, the US still accounts for 44 per cent of major cloud and internet data centre sites, Synergy Research found. The next most prominent locations are China, Japan and the UK, which collectively account for another 20 per cent of the total.

“It is remarkable that the US still accounts for almost half of all hyperscale data centres, reflecting the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies,” Dinsdale commented. “Other countries are now featuring more prominently in terms of data centre build, but even three years from now we forecast that the US will still account for some 40 per cent of the worldwide total.”

The research is based on an analysis of the data centre footprint of 24 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including cloud services, search, social networking and e-commerce. 

On average each of the 24 firms had 16 data centre sites. The cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google have the broadest data centre footprint, each with 45 or more data centre locations across at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Oracle and Alibaba also have a broad data centre presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centres focused primarily in either the US (Apple, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Yahoo) or China (Tencent, Baidu).