Data centers have become the fifth utility and as critical as water, electricity, gas and telecoms, observes a UK based data and analytics company report. It attributes the acceleration of their importance to the COVID-19 pandemic .
The report predicts that data centre revenues will hit $948 billion by 2030, up from $466 billion in 2020 and having grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.7% over this period.
Thematic Research report ‘Data Centres’ also says that reliance on data centres to provide cloud services will dictate the market expansion primarily from building of massive hyperscale data centres
in the coming years.
Principal analyst of the team said, “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, the pandemic-driven accelerating shift to the cloud has put a premium on flexibility. This will drive the adoption of new architectures and software-defined, programmable infrastructures within data centres.”
He also added, “Governments will now have higher expectations of the data centre sector. The expansion of data centres reflects the need for increased artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities, but these have a poor carbon footprint.”
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.
According to the report , 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.
