- Market growth expected to rise to $948b by 2030 from $466b in 2020, GlobalData says.
- Accelerating shift to the cloud to drive the adoption of new architectures and software-defined, programmable infrastructures within data centres.
- Next few years will see increased mergers and acquisition (M&A) data centre activity, with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) being created to buy up data centres.
Data centres have become a fifth utility that is as critical as water, electricity, gas and telecoms, according to an industry expert.
David Bicknell, Principal Analyst in the Thematic Research team at research firm GlobalData, said that data centre-provided cloud services have allowed remote workers to collaborate with colleagues, provide entertainment for locked-down citizens, deliver online learning and enable online shopping.
At the same time, he said that the pandemic-driven accelerating shift to the cloud has put a premium on flexibility and this will, in turn, drive the adoption of new architectures and software-defined, programmable infrastructures within data centres.
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the vital importance of data centres and businesses are increasingly reliant on data centres to provide cloud services, which will drive a significant market expansion over the next decade.
Need for AI processing capabilities
GlobalData forecasts that data centre revenues will hit $948 billion by 2030, up from $466 billion in 2020 and growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.7 per cent over this period, much of this growth will come from the building of massive hyperscale data centres.
Bicknell said that new edge data centres will also cater to increasing levels of enterprise-generated data being created and processed outside remote data centres or the cloud.
“The next few years will also see increased mergers and acquisition (M&A) data centre activity, with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) being created to buy up data centres,” he said.
Moreover, he said that data centres have gone from anonymity to seeing their staff now designated as key workers.
But this new-found utility status, he added may be a double-edged sword.
“Governments will now have higher expectations of the data centre sector. The expansion of data centres reflects the need for increased AI processing capabilities, but these have a poor carbon footprint. With governments focused on climate change, meeting stringent sustainability targets will be an unwelcome reward for an industry that excelled during the pandemic,” he said.