Hyperscale Data Center Capacity to Almost Triple in Next Six Years, Driven by AI

New data and forecasts from Synergy Research Group show that the average capacity of hyperscale data centers to be opened over the next six years will soon be more than double that of current operational hyperscale data centers. While the trend has always been for the critical IT load of hyperscale data centers to grow in size over time, the impact of generative AI technology and services has provided an added impetus to the need for substantially more powerful facilities. Meanwhile, as the average IT load of individual data centers ramps up, the number of operational hyperscale data centers will continue to steadily grow. There will also be some degree of retrofitting existing data centers to boost their capacity. The overall result is that the total capacity of all operational hyperscale data centers will grow almost threefold in the next six years.

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The hyperscale research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint and operations of 19 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, who meet Synergy’s criteria for being considered hyperscale operators. This includes the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. By mid-2023, those companies had 926 major data centers in operation around the world. Synergy’s known pipeline of future data centers includes a further 427 facilities, which is one of the main inputs to Synergy’s forecast model.

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The mix of hyperscale data centers continues to change, region by region, and owned versus leased, but in aggregate the total number of worldwide data centers has doubled in the last five years. The impact of recent generative AI advances is not so much to increase the number of data centers – which will continue to grow by well over a hundred per year – but to substantially increase the amount of power required to run those data centers. As the number of GPUs in hyperscale data centers skyrockets, driven primarily by AI, so the power density of associated racks and data center facilities also need to increase substantially. This is causing hyperscale operators to rethink some of their data center architecture and deployment plans.

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