A recent study carried out by the Synergy Research Group shows that most of today’s Internet and cloud services are based in the US.
The study analyzed the data center footprint for the world’s 13 biggest cloud and Internet service firms, catering to home users, social networks, e-commerce platforms, online search, but also to IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS cloud services.
The data is relevant for the 2015 Q2 period, and according to the research, these 13 companies have around 150 major data centers around the globe, with an average of 11 different data center sites per company.
The top 3 companies that deploy data centers: AWS, IBM and Microsoft
According to the research, the most spread-out data center structure is in the possession of cloud service providers like AWS, IBM and Microsoft, who need to offer low-latency products to clients around the globe.
Each of these three companies has over 20 data centers, with at least one in the globe’s four major regions – North America, Latin America, APAC (Asia Pacific and Australasian Continent), and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa).
The top three companies are followed by Google, Oracle, and Rackspace, which also have a broad data center presence, but with fewer numbers.
The other companies included in the study, Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, have data centers primarily located in the US or China, where the bulk of their audience is.
44% of all data centers are located in the US
Breaking down the data by country, we see that the US accounts for almost half of the world’s data centers, with 44%.
In a distant second place we see China with a meager 10%, followed by smaller players like Australia, Japan, Singapore, and the UK, with 5%.
“The ranking also reflects the relative importance of smaller countries that are often used as regional hubs – Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands and Ireland,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Until recently India was an omission from the list but Microsoft has just opened its first major cloud data centers in the country and both AWS and IBM will soon be following suit.”