Where do data centers live? Rating of countries by number of data centers

The company Synergy Research Group decided to find out which countries have the most data centers. The work was based on the processing of open information, analysis of the geographical distribution of data centers of the largest IT countries in the world. Synergy Research Group analyzed most of the companies involved in the provision of cloud services on models of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS.

Plus, the ranking included owners of search engines, social networks, online auctions, etc. It turned out that the 13 largest companies that are densely occupied in this area, own about 150 truly large data centers. On average, the company has about 11 large data centers.
')
As for geographical distribution, the United States of America and China are in the lead. The top ten also includes the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands. The leader’s share accounts for about 44% of the largest data centers. In China, however, only 10% . To the other countries mentioned - 4-5% of DC.

Currently, due to the growing needs of Web users in the “heavy” content, as well as the growing number of users themselves, the telecommunications giants are expanding their data centers, or are building new ones. Interestingly, in Russia, despite the economic problems, the number of DCs is growing, plus the existing data centers are expanding. This is due to the “law on personal data”, according to which the data of Russian users should be stored and processed in Russia.

Most data centers now have such giants as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft: each of these companies owns 20 or more data center campuses. Such companies are trying to more or less evenly distribute their computing power across different regions. Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft manage DCs in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and some other regions.

Powerful and Google, Oracle, Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo and Rackspace. True, these companies have the most DCs in the USA. The Chinese giants Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, not surprisingly, most data centers are located in China.

Most likely, it is in China that the growth in the number of data centers will be the maximum in the next few years - the number of Internet users here is huge and constantly increasing. Accordingly, the load increases, and the existing infrastructure can no longer cope.

Synergy Research Group specialists conducted and analyzed the sources of electrical energy for data centers of various companies. Here stand out separately renewable energy sources that are most actively used by Microsoft, Google, Facebook.

Among the alternative sources, the first place belongs to solar energy (photovoltaic cells, heating elements, etc.), followed by fuel stations, wind power, hydropower and geothermal power plants.