China and U.S. dominate cloud data center locations

Cloud and Internet Data Centers
U.S. now accounts for 44 percent of major cloud and internet data center sites, followed by China which accounts for 10 percent.

The U.S. and China are followed by Australia, UK, Japan, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands, each of which accounts for 4-5 percent of the total, according to Synergy Research Group.

The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 13 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, search, social networking and e-commerce. In aggregate the companies now have almost 150 major data center sites.

Each of the 13 firms had 11 data center sites on average.

Hyperscale cloud providers — AWS, IBM and Microsoft have the broadest data centers. Each has 20 or more data center locations with at least one in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.

The IT research report said that Google, Oracle and Rackspace also have a notably broad data center presence. Salesforce, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo have data centers in the U.S. while Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba have data centers in China.

“The country distribution of major data centers clearly reflects two things – the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies; and the scale and unique characteristics of the Chinese market,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group.

Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands and Ireland are the regional hubs for data centers.

Microsoft has opened its first major cloud data centers in India. AWS and IBM will soon be opening data centers in India.

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