The world’s largest hyperscalers now own 700 data centers combined, and the United States accounts for 49% of the global capacity of those facilities, according to a new report from Synergy Research Group.

The U.S. share of worldwide capacity continues to decline, but this is not a case of the bigger they come, the harder they fall. The U.S. command of global IT load capacity is falling at just 1% per year, according to the IT and cloud market research firm.

China, the second-largest contributor to hyperscale data center capacity, ended the third quarter of 2021 with a 15% share. Hyperscalers based in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa commanded a combined 19% of global capacity at the end of Q3.

The remainder of the Asia-Pacific region, excluding China, grabbed a 13% share of capacity, and the rest of the Americas combined for the remaining 4% share, according to Synergy Research Group. 

Hyperscale capacity is growing on two fronts. The world’s leading cloud providers are adding more data centers to their respective footprints. Meanwhile, the total capacity of each data center has been growing even more quickly through efforts to increase the total size of existing data centers.

“It has taken five years for the number of hyperscale data centers to double, but less than four years for the capacity to double,” the analysts wrote in the report.

Unsurprisingly, the quartet of leading cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM — command the broadest data center footprint with each company operating at least 60 data center locations, according to Synergy Research Group. The cloud giants also have at least three data centers in each of the four regions: North America; Asia Pacific; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and Latin America.

Meta joins Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in having the largest data center capacities overall, but Synergy Research Group notes that Chinese hyperscalers, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, are currently growing capacity at the fastest rate.

“While the number of hyperscale data centers continues to grow at an impressive pace, not all data centers are born equal,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, wrote in the report.

“Generally speaking, self-owned data centers are much bigger than leased data centers, and data centers in the home country of a hyperscale company are much bigger than its international facilities though there are plenty of exceptions to these trends,” he added. “The constants in all of this are that both the number and average size of hyperscale data centers continue to grow steadily.”