COVID-19 Isn’t Slowing AWS And Google’s Data Center Expansion Plans

There are 176 hyperscale data centers in the pipeline, with AWS and Google accounting for over half of all new data centers constructed over the past 12 months, according to Synergy Research Group.

The coronavirus pandemic isn’t slowing down Amazon Web Services, Google, Oracle and Microsoft from spending billions on building and equipping new hyperscale data centers.

The total number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers jumped to 541 at the end of the second quarter of 2020, according to new data from Synergy Research Group. AWS and Google opened the most new data centers in the last 12 months, accounting for over half of the total, followed by Microsoft and Oracle.

“There were 100 new hyperscale data centers opened in the last eight quarters, with 26 of those being in the first half of this year,” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said in a statement. “COVID-19 has caused some logistical issues but these are robust numbers, demonstrating the underlying strength of the services that are driving these investments.”

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While a traditional data center typically supports hundreds of physical servers and other IT hardware along with thousands of virtual machines, massive hyperscale data centers house tens of thousands of servers and hardware alongside millions of virtual machines.

Looking ahead, Synergy said there are 176 new hyperscale data centers in the pipeline.

“We have visibility of a further 176 data centers that are at various stages of planning or building, which is good news for data center hardware vendors and wholesale data center operators,” said Dinsdale.

Dell Technologies and Microsoft are the revenue leaders in terms of data center hardware and software infrastructure. The global data center hardware and software infrastructure market dropped 2 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2020 to roughly $36 billion, according to Synergy. However, the coronavirus pandemic did not have an impact on the big public cloud infrastructure players as global data center hardware and software sales for public cloud infrastructure increased 3 percent year over year to $13 billion, accounting for 37 percent of the total market in the first quarter of 2020.

In terms of geography, the U.S. accounts for nearly 40 percent of the major cloud and internet data center sites, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific regions having the highest growth rates.

The most popular locations for hyperscale data centers are in Australia, China, Germany, Japan and the U.K., which combined account for about 30 percent of the total. Over the last four quarters, new data centers were opened in 15 different countries led by the U.S., South Korea, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa and Bahrain.

Synergy said more than 70 percent of all hyperscale data centers are located in facilities that are leased from data center operators— such as Digital Realty and Equinix—or are owned by partners of the hyperscale operators.