Investments in global data centers will continue to grow over the next few years. While North America was the largest market in the world for investments in 2021, the APAC region is expected to surpass it by the end of 2026. India is a key market to watch in this region due to its tremendous growth potential during the forecast period, with an estimated CAGR of 22%.
A few trends to watch include:
Hybrid and Multi-cloud Configurations
Organizations worldwide are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud platform configurations to gain flexibility in hosting applications in the best infrastructure possible. This flexibility will enable enterprises to move workloads and data easily across infrastructures and clouds.
Sustainability
Sustainability continues to be a top priority for data center operators. An emerging and related trend is sustainability-backed financing, in which data center operators highlight their sustainability excellence to secure financing.
The Growth of Hyperscale
Hyperscale data centers grew at a tremendous rate and will continue to grow over the next five years, ultimately offering growth potential for colocation service providers.
To put the growth of hyperscale into context, Facebook’s data center CAPEX increased by 48% over the past five years; during the same period, Alibaba and Tencent recorded similar increases in CAPEX. The total number of hyperscale data centers grew by 142% between 2015 and 2021, and the total number of hyperscale data centers is expected to reach 890 in 2025.
The Lithium-ion Era of Energy Storage
Data center operators are currently focusing more on using lithium (Li)-ion batteries as an alternative to lead-acid batteries due to technology advancements in the electric vehicles industry. However, other trends, such as increasing power density, peak shaving, demand response programs, and grid frequency regulation, are also driving data center operators to re-evaluate their UPS (uninterrupted power supply) battery preferences. A few data center operators have switched to advanced batteries, and many more can be expected to make this switch.
