Hyperscale data center operators will double their capex levels over the next five years, Dell’Oro Group predicts in a new report.
This investment increase will push total global data center capex to $350 billion by 2026, the market research firm states in the newly released January 2022 Data Center IT Capex 5-Year Forecast Report.
“Our outlook for spending on data center infrastructure capex is optimistic, with a five-year projected growth of 10%,” said Baron Fung, research director at Dell’Oro.
Fung adds, “The hyperscale cloud service providers will account for an increasing portion of the total market, as they invest to expand their network of data centers, increase cloud capacity, and deploy AI infrastructure to enable new applications such as the metaverse. We also anticipate incremental growth as data center infrastructure become more distributed, as the cloud and telecom service providers and enterprises launch new services at the edge of the network.”
Server spending will grow most strongly within the next five years, thanks to adoption in new server CPU platforms and accelerated computing. Meanwhile, Dell’Oro believes edge computing will receive significant attention, growing to 8% of total data center infrastructure spending by 2026.
Dell’Oro’s Data Center IT Capex 5-Year Forecast Report provides an overview of the market with historical data from 2014 to the present. The forecasts reveal market and technology trends and include tables covering data center and server capex and server unit shipments forecasts for “Top 4 U.S. Cloud,” “Top 3 China Cloud,” “Top 3 Tier 2 Cloud,” “Rest-of-Cloud,” “Telco,” and “Enterprise” customer segments.
The report also breaks out markets for data center infrastructure equipment, along with server, storage system, and other data center equipment revenues sub-segments.