- Technology
- Cloud
June 26, 2022updated 24 Aug 2022 10:08am
Cloud providers may soon move their data centres away from Western capitals to lesser-known cities in unexpected places.
By Afiq Fitri
Cloud computing users, whether they are consumers, developers or enterprise IT departments, rarely consider where their data is stored. But, of course, these cloud services have a physical presence – one that is growing, as demand for cloud services increases.
Tech Monitor has mapped out the locations of data centres operated by the seven biggest cloud providers in the market: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba, and Tencent. This reveals where ‘the cloud’ is really located, and where the hyperscale cloud providers are building their new facilities.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of data centres are located in well-known capital cities and financial hubs: places like London and Frankfurt, Sydney and Singapore where high volumes of transactional data places a premium on efficiency among cloud computing providers.
However, concerns about sustainability are leading cloud providers to consider new locations previously overlooked for their distance from the financial action. This includes countries such as Mexico and Saudi Arabia, where solar power offers a cheap and renewable source of energy capable of accommodating their rapacious electricity needs.
How data centre locations are decided
Until recently, three main priorities have informed where the leading cloud providers have chosen to locate their data centres: regulatory risk, proximity to demand, and the absence of environmental dangers.
The first has become a significant consideration for the sector in the past few years, explains Accenture’s cloud infrastructure engineering lead Emma Roscow, as the EU ensures global players take extra steps to guarantee that the personal data of its citizens is protected.
“The European Union alone has 27 countries and 24 languages, several with their own local jurisdictions and regulations over how companies should collect, store and process data,” she says. “Many require personal data of citizens to be processed within its borders, making the data centre’s location crucial to compliance.”
But the most important consideration when running a data centre is arguably its uptime, adds Roscow. “Cloud providers have targets and guarantee uptime as high as 99.995% in some cases,” she says. Geography, therefore, is a key factor. “Areas that are at a higher risk of natural disasters are unsuitable, as there is too much of a risk that an incident could take it offline for long periods of time.”
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Where are data centres located?
It should therefore be unsurprising that the largest concentration of cloud data centres in Europe are to be found in Germany, with the majority of them located in Frankfurt.
All of the seven cloud providers analysed have established data centres in the city, according to locations data provided by Netskope. Blessed with mild weather all year round, Frankfurt’s prospects as a cloud computing hub are also boosted by its hosting one of the most developed internet exchange points in the world, fuelled by the massive demand for fast data transfers that have accompanied Frankfurt’s development into a financial powerhouse.
“Certain applications require data to be processed as close to real-time as possible, particularly areas such as financial services,” Roscow explains. “Traditional business hubs are therefore always likely to remain key locations for data centres so that services are not restricted by latency issues.” Other global financial hubs like London also have a high concentration of cloud data centres, with six of the seven biggest cloud providers setting up across the capital.
Cloud providers have also set their sights on building new data centres in other European capitals. Google data centres are planned for Milan and Turin, while Microsoft is looking to expand in Warsaw and Zurich. Amazon is also planning on a new data centre in Zurich, as well as in Madrid.
Meanwhile in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia boasts one of the highest concentrations of data centres operated by the Big Seven, with a total of 21 spread across Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra.
Part of the reason for this is the country’s ambitious ‘cloud-first’ strategy launched back in 2014, which mandated the use of cloud services in the public and private sector. Today, more than half of all businesses in Australia are using paid cloud services, and there are public commitments to ensure that all government agencies in New South Wales have a quarter of their ICT services hosted on a public cloud by next year.
Singapore has also embarked on a ‘cloud-first’ digital transformation effort, with significant results to show for it. To date, the city-state hosts data centres from all of the seven big cloud providers and has the highest number of data centres in Southeast Asia, according to the data.
This is largely due to the launching in 2018 of a national five-year project aiming to migrate the bulk of government IT resources from on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud. According to Singapore’s government technology agency, more than 600 systems are now hosted on the cloud.
New hotspot locations for data centres are emerging
Big tech has also played a significant role in upgrading Singapore’s cloud capabilities. In February, Microsoft announced a partnership with the innovation arm of the government’s security agencies to develop a ‘sovereign cloud’ which can reportedly provide high-speed network connectivity and advanced analytics for the use of real-time data, thereby enabling "swifter incident response and decision-making".
But other, more isolated areas are also beginning to emerge as ideal locations to host data centres. This pivot, explains Infiniti IT’s service manager Henry Ettinger, is attributable in large part to “concerns over the supply of renewable energy, and what can be done to lower their carbon footprint”.
In March, Microsoft announced the completion of a new data centre in Mexico’s Querétaro state, a place the company described as the ‘new data centre hotspot in Latin America’ and a ‘hub for industry 4.0’ in the region. Querétaro also boasts all of the features associated with other international cloud hotspots, including advanced local network infrastructure, proximity to important economic centres, and low seismic activity.
The coastal desert town of Dammam in Saudi Arabia is another area that other cloud providers are setting their sights on. In December 2020, Google announced it was preparing to launch a cloud region in the country, with Dammam being announced last year as the location for the company’s first data centre in the country.
The region’s ongoing boom in smart city projects and the city’s proximity to several subsea cables, including the Global Cloud Xchange’s Falcon and the Trans Europe Asia System, also makes it an ideal location for cloud hyperscalers.
Where cloud providers are building green data centres
Building infrastructure that requires constant cooling processes in a desert town like Dammam might seem counterintuitive - until one considers just how much solar power can be sourced in the Arabian Desert nearby. It's potential that’s already being realised in the construction of new solar plants in the region by the Saudi government, intended to supply the region with up to a gigawatt of cheap, renewable energy. In theory, this could also lead to improved data centre sustainability and reduce the environmental impact.
“Historically, data centres have been located in colder climates due to the lower costs associated with cooling and ventilation,” says Roscow. Rising energy costs amid a changing climate, however, are pushing cloud providers to consider new places in which to house their server racks. These considerations will only become more pronounced over time, adds Roscow, with demand for large-scale data centres predicted to increase 14% year-on-year.
Solar isn’t perfect: after all, the sun shines brightest in some of the most hostile environments on this planet. Even so, says Roscow, “as we see the proliferation of cloud and different factors being prioritised by customers when choosing vendors, we may see the trend towards new locations continue.
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Read more: The role of cloud computing in the journey to net zero
Topics in this article: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
Afiq Fitri
Afiq Fitri is a data journalist for Tech Monitor.
FAQs
Where are the most data centers being built? ›
Northern Virginia remained the world's largest data center market and added 185.1 MW of new supply in H2 2021. Northern Virginia has 239 MW of wholesale colocation capacity under construction, 100 MW of which is preleased.
What is hyperscale cloud computing data centers? ›Hyperscale data centers are massive business-critical facilities designed to efficiently support robust, scalable applications and are often associated with big data-producing companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.
What are hyperscale cloud providers? ›Examples of hyperscalers are Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM, and Oracle. • Hyperscaler cloud service providers: Entities that consult, design, develop, build, manage, and orchestrate software, data, and applications provided by one or multiple hyperscalers.
Which cloud provider has the most data centers? ›Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing service of Amazon.com, is the largest cloud service provider globally. From its data centers, the business provides over 200 fully featured services including compute, storage, and database. What is this? AWS currently has 26 regions and 84 availability zones in operation.
Where are the cloud data centers located? ›The Asia & Pacific region is home to the most cloud data centers (95). The United States and Canada region is not far behind (79). Together these regions account for 72 percent of the world's cloud data centers, with Europe housing 24 percent and Latin America just 4 percent.
What makes a good location for a data center? ›There are a number of additional factors to consider. These include local data protection laws, tax structures, access to utilities, availability of suitable networking solutions, local infrastructure, the accessibility of a skilled labor pool, track record and existing customers or reference clients.
Who builds hyperscale datacenter? ›IBM provides the design technology, business solutions and several other services. DFT hyperscale data center owned by DuPont Fabros Technology is located in Ashburn, Virginia. It spans across 1.6 million square feet of space and has seven different data center buildings.
How many hyperscale data centers are there? ›At the end of 2021 there were 728 hyperscale data centres in operation globally, according to the research firm, with 314 new facilities planned: Fulfilling that pipeline will take the global total past the 1,000 mark by around the end of 2024.
Why are cloud providers called Hyperscalers? ›What are Hyperscalers? This term stems from hyperscale computing, which is an agile method of processing data. Depending on data traffic, scale can quickly go up or down. Hyperscalers have taken this computing method and applied it to data centers and the cloud to accommodate fluctuating demand.
How many hyperscale data centers are there in India? ›The latest development takes NTT's data centre footprint in the country to 12 facilities, with more than 2.5 million sq.
What are the three types of cloud data centers? ›
There are also three main types of cloud computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Choosing a cloud type or cloud service is a unique decision.
Who are the top 5 hyperscalers? ›The companies that feature most heavily in the future new data center pipeline are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google. 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.
Where is the largest data center in the world? ›According to numerous publications, the world's largest data center is the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park. At a cost of $3 billion, it spans one million square meters (10,763,910 square feet) and consumes 150MW across six data halls.
Which platform is best for your cloud data warehouse? ›If you want both your data team to collaborate seamlessly using a modern, easy, and fast cloud data warehousing solution, Snowflake is the best option for you. If you're looking for a solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing cloud platform, choose Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift.
Do cloud providers have data centers? ›While cloud companies have their own data centers, organizations often have their own data centers as well, which are referred to as on-premises or on-prem for short.
Why are data centers built in the desert? ›About 99.9% of the heat on the inside is a function of the energy we put into the data center. It's energy in and energy out. We bring in a great deal of electrical energy and remove it in the form of heat. One of the benefits of the desert is it's very dry.
Why data centers are near sea? ›More than half the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel, leading to fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming and game playing.
How many countries are global cloud data centers are located in? ›Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the cloud computing service of Alphabet Inc, provides compute, storage, and networking services through its data centers in over 20 countries and 35 locations around the world.
What factors are important in choosing the location of a cloud data center explain briefly? ›Proximity to major markets and customers. Availability and cost of real estate options. Amount of local and state economic development incentives. Availability of telecommunications infrastructure.
What are the four main types of data centers? ›Data center needs vary depending on their structure, physical limitations, density requirements and more. Here are four common data center types including onsite, colocation facilities, hyperscale, and edge data centers, as well as their use cases and industry trends.
What are the three main components of a data center? ›
Data centers are made up of three primary types of components: compute, storage, and network.
Does AWS build their own data centers? ›Since then, Amazon has only aggressively expanded its data center presence, building out facilities around the world and leasing space from wholesale companies.
Where is Amazon building data centers? ›Amazon Web Services (AWS) has filed to build a new data center in DeSoto, outside Dallas, Texas.
Why are so many data centers being built? ›“The reliance on technology platforms over last 24 months is at an all-time high, creating demand for more data center space across the world,” says Phoenix-based Carl Beardsley, senior director with JLL Capital Markets, who notes that the big operators and users are responding by building-out data space and turning it ...
Is Google hyperscale in cloud computing? ›Hyperscale computing is characterized by standardization, automation, redundancy, high performance computing (HPC) and high availability (HA). The term is often associated with cloud computing and the very large data centers owned by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Netflix.
Where are the most data centers located Europe? ›Number of data centers in selected European countries 2021
As of August 2021, 453 data centers were located in Germany.
Thirty-four miles from Washington D.C. lies Ashburn, a city in Virginia's Loudon County. It may sound like just another regular city, but it's impressively known as the Data Center Capital of the World.
What is the difference between hyperscale and cloud? ›Hyperscale cloud is a type of cloud environment that is also known as public cloud. It has the ability to scale computer infrastructure based on the amount of demand. It is used for cloud computing, big data, and distributed systems.
What is an advantage of using hyperscale cloud computing data centers? ›So hyperscale data centers are exceptionally agile, with the ability to scale up, down, and out to meet any load they service. This can mean adding more compute power, as well as adding more machines, or the ability to scale out to the edge of a network.
What is hyperscale cloud infrastructure? ›As its name implies, hyperscale is all about achieving massive scale in computing—typically for big data or cloud computing. Hyperscale infrastructure is designed for horizontal scalability and leads to high levels of performance, throughput, and redundancy to enable fault tolerance and high availability.
Where are most data centers located in India? ›
There are 138 Indian data centers, the majority of these colocation facilities are located in and around Mumbai.
Why India is building massive data centres? ›“India has witnessed a massive adoption of digital transactions, IoT and smart devices since the pandemic. The nation's youth being tech-savvy, the usage of digital devices is only expected to surge, creating a large volume of data, which will drive the need for data centres.
What is cloud data center and how does IT work? ›A cloud data center moves a traditional on-prem data center off-site. Instead of personally managing their own infrastructure, an organization leases infrastructure managed by a third-party partner and accesses data center resources over the Internet.
What is an example of a data center? ›For example, a data center built for a cloud service provider like Amazon satisfies facility, infrastructure and security requirements that significantly differ from a completely private data center, such as one built for a government facility that is dedicated to securing classified data.
What are the different types of data centers in cloud computing? ›- Colocation. A colocation center — also known as a “carrier hotel” — is a type of data center where you can rent equipment, space, and bandwidth from the data center's owner.
- Enterprise. ...
- Cloud. ...
- Edge Data Center. ...
- Micro Data Center.
Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is a SQL-based and highly scalable cloud service tier for single databases. With its revolutionary cloud-born architecture which decouples compute, log and storage, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale provides you with up to 100 TB of storage.
Is Apple a Hyperscaler? ›Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Apple are the major hyperscale companies that operate data centers and have a presence across the globe.
What is the first data center in the world? ›Data centers have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the 1940s, typified by ENIAC, one of the earliest examples of a data center. Early computer systems, complex to operate and maintain, required a special environment in which to operate.
How many data centers are there in the world today? ›Data Center Industry
According to CloudScene data6 of 110 countries with available information, as of January 2021 there were nearly 8,000 data centers globally.
Northern Virginia also remains an especially popular location for data centers. It's affectionately known as the “Silicon Valley of the East” or “Data Center Alley” since it is a hub for IT infrastructure. Because of this infrastructure, data centers can achieve fast connectivity across the U.S. and even into Europe.
What are the 3 main cloud delivery models? ›
There are three major cloud service models: software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
Which server is used to store data in cloud computing? ›Cloud-based data is stored in logical pools across disparate, commodity storage servers located on premises or in a data center managed by a third-party cloud provider. Cloud service providers manage and maintain data transferred to the cloud.
Which data warehouse architecture is most successful? ›The hub and spoke is the most prevalent architecture (39%), followed by the bus architecture (26%), centralized (17 %), independent data marts (12%), and federated (4%). The most common platform for hosting the data warehouses is Oracle (41%), followed by Microsoft (19%) and IBM (18%).
Where are the cloud data centers located? ›The Asia & Pacific region is home to the most cloud data centers (95). The United States and Canada region is not far behind (79). Together these regions account for 72 percent of the world's cloud data centers, with Europe housing 24 percent and Latin America just 4 percent.
Where are the most data centers being built? ›Northern Virginia remained the world's largest data center market and added 185.1 MW of new supply in H2 2021. Northern Virginia has 239 MW of wholesale colocation capacity under construction, 100 MW of which is preleased.
Where are cloud providers located? ›Cloud servers are usually located in data centres or server farms, and there is a huge network of data centres around the world, all connected by the internet. Big name cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft and AWS have their own networks of data centres which form their own cloud platforms.
How many data centers are being built in the US? ›In 2021, more than 100 data center projects were launched or were under construction in the US. Over 90% of data center projects are developed by colocation service providers and hyperscale operators such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The rest are enterprise data centers.
What US state has the most data centers? ›Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the United States. This extremely mature and well connected area traces its roots to the U.S. Government's experiments in wide area fiber optic networking in the late 1960s.
Why are all data centers in Ashburn? ›In Ashburn, Virginia, there are so many data centers because of the region's history as a network access point (NAP), cost-effective & abundant power, dense network connectivity, low risk of natural disasters, rich ecosystem of network & cloud providers, and tax & permitting incentives for data center development.
Why are data centers built in the desert? ›About 99.9% of the heat on the inside is a function of the energy we put into the data center. It's energy in and energy out. We bring in a great deal of electrical energy and remove it in the form of heat. One of the benefits of the desert is it's very dry.
Where is the largest data center in the world? ›
According to numerous publications, the world's largest data center is the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park. At a cost of $3 billion, it spans one million square meters (10,763,910 square feet) and consumes 150MW across six data halls.
What is the largest data center company in the world? ›#1) Equinix
It has a vast network of 202 data centers around the world, with 12 more being installed. Core Services: Equinix offers 5 core services which include: Managed Services: Equinix offers managed services that allow the integration of data and applications.
There are more than 600 hyperscale data centers as of 2021. To truly understand the size of a hyperscale data center, we compare the conventional definition, 5,000 servers in 10,000 square feet., to the five largest hyperscale data centers and the region they serve.
What is the data center capital of the world? ›Thirty-four miles from Washington D.C. lies Ashburn, a city in Virginia's Loudon County. It may sound like just another regular city, but it's impressively known as the Data Center Capital of the World.
What are the four main types of data centers? ›Data center needs vary depending on their structure, physical limitations, density requirements and more. Here are four common data center types including onsite, colocation facilities, hyperscale, and edge data centers, as well as their use cases and industry trends.
Who has the most data in the world? ›- General Electric. GE – with its fingers in every pie from finance to aviation to power, is perfectly positioned to benefit from its championing of “The internet of things”. ...
- IBM. ...
- Amazon. ...
- Facebook. ...
- Google. ...
- Cloudera. ...
- Kaggle.
Loudoun County's “Data Center Alley” is the world's largest concentration of data centers, with more than 25 million square feet currently in operation and millions more being planned or developed.
Why data centers are near sea? ›More than half the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel, leading to fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming and game playing.
Why are so many data centers being built? ›“The reliance on technology platforms over last 24 months is at an all-time high, creating demand for more data center space across the world,” says Phoenix-based Carl Beardsley, senior director with JLL Capital Markets, who notes that the big operators and users are responding by building-out data space and turning it ...
Which type of data centers are built? ›- Enterprise data centers. These proprietary data centers are built and owned by organizations for their internal end users. ...
- Managed services data centers. ...
- Cloud-based data centers. ...
- Colocation data centers. ...
- Edge data centers. ...
- Hyperscale data centers.
Why are cloud data centers better? ›
Scalability: In an on-premises data center, resource scalability is limited by the infrastructure that the company has purchased and deployed. In the cloud, additional resources can be quickly and easily spun up as needed.
Where is considered the best place to build a data center in North America? ›Northern Virginia also remains an especially popular location for data centers. It's affectionately known as the “Silicon Valley of the East” or “Data Center Alley” since it is a hub for IT infrastructure. Because of this infrastructure, data centers can achieve fast connectivity across the U.S. and even into Europe.