$10B Apple plan part of surge in data center construction

The ever-increasing number of connected devices and the need to store all the resulting data has led to a rise in U.S. data center construction that shows no signs of slowing down.  Apple recently announced that it would invest $10 billion in data centers in the next five years — a move that puts it at the forefront of investment in such projects but certainly not on its own. In fact, according to a recent Insight Partners report, the value of the international data center construction market was $43.7 billion in 2017, and, at a compound annual growth rate of 10.2%, is expected to be $92.9 billion in 2025.  The data centers being built fall mostly into two categories — those that will serve only the needs of huge, data-heavy companies like Google and Facebook and those being built for collocation firms like CyrusOne. Both types of centers include those classified as “hyperscale,” which are made flexible enough through energy efficiencies and other optimizations to be able to expand and meet demands of big data, cloud computing and enterprise customers.