Nearly half of world's cloud hubs on US soil

US accounts for 44 per cent of major cloud and internet datacentre sites, compared with five per cent for the UK, research finds

The US leads the world in terms of the number of major cloud and internet datacentre sites, with 44 per cent housed on American soil, according to Synergy.

This is leagues ahead of the UK, which the research group reports has come in third globally alongside Australia, Japan and Singapore – all with five per cent.

The number of cloud centres in China put it in second place, with 10 per cent. Germany and the Netherlands each claimed four per cent of centres, with the rest of the world sitting at 18 per cent combined.
Synergy based its research on analysis of the datacentre footprint of 13 of the world’s biggest cloud and internet service firms, social networks and e-commerce providers.

Combined, these firms have about 150 major centre sites.

The leading hyper-scale cloud providers – AWS, IBM and Microsoft – had the broadest datacentre footprint. Each of these companies has 20 or more datacentre locations, with at least one in North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America.

Other companies included in the research were Google, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo as well as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba in China.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, commented: “The country distribution of major datacentres reflects two things: the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies; and the scale and unique characteristics of the Chinese market.

“The ranking also reflects the relative importance of smaller countries that are often used as regional hubs – Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands and Ireland. Until recently India was an omission from the list but Microsoft has just opened its first major cloud datacentres in the country and both AWS and IBM will soon be following suit.”