The number of hyperscale data centers has surged to new heights with 19 providers operating more than 1,000 data center worldwide, according to recently released data from Synergy Research Group (SRG).

In four years’ time, hyperscale data center capacity doubled to hit 992 facilities at the end of 2023. SRG expects data center capacity to double again in the next four years to serve the growing need for artificial intelligence (AI), with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Meta ranking as the most active operators.

Specifically, AWS, Google and Microsoft combined to account for 60% of global hyperscale data center capacity, with AWS’ and Google’s share “somewhat bigger” than Microsoft, SRG Chief Analyst John Dinsdale told SDxCentral.

The next five biggest operators are Meta, Alibaba, Tencent, Apple and ByteDance, which together represent another 30% of global capacity. The remaining operators account for the final 10% of capacity.

“We have been tracking strong growth for a long time now and were already forecasting continued strong growth in both hyperscale data centers and associated capacity,” Dinsdale said. “The advent of generative AI technology and services has caused us to nudge up our existing growth forecast a bit,” he said.

The projected additional 120 to 130 data centers each year will increase global capacity not just by the nature of their addition, but by their larger scale, which is optimized for high performance computing (HPC) workloads like machine learning and generative AI (genAI).

SRG’s growth forecast is based on its known pipeline of future hyperscale data centers, which today includes 440 facilities in varying phases of planning and development.

As the sheer number and scale of data centers continue to rise, so do the complexity and nuances of those trends, according to Dinsdale.

For example, privately owned data centers tend to be larger than leased data centers, and hyperscale data centers are larger in the company’s home country than its international data centers.

According to SRG data, the U.S. represents 51% of global data center capacity in terms of megawatts (MW) of critical IT load. Europe and China each represent a third of the remaining capacity.

“We’re also seeing something of a bifurcation in data center scale,” Dinsdale said. “While the core data centers are getting ever bigger, there is also an increasing number of relatively smaller data centers being deployed in order to push infrastructure nearer to customers.”

Data center services provider Greensparc, for instance, recently partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to deliver edge computing infrastructure to a remote community in Alaska. The smaller-scale edge data centers boast lower energy costs and reduced latency, according to the vendor.

“Putting it all together though, all major growth trend lines are heading sharply up and to the right,” Dinsdale said.