Hyperscale Capex Soars to $53 Billion in First Half of 2018

Hyperscale operators maintained their record-setting year of capex spending, which was up 59 percent in the second quarter from the same period last year, according to a new report from Synergy Research Group. In the first half of 2018, the hyperscale operators spent $53 billion on capex, up from $31 billion in the first half of 2017. Synergy Research analyzes the capex and data center footprint of the world’s largest cloud and internet service firms at the end of each quarter. This includes the largest operators of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), search, social networking, and e-commerce. According to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy Research, its previous analysis data of the hyperscale market included 24 companies. However, the research firm reduced this to 20 companies because LinkedIn has been integrated into Microsoft and three other companies weren’t spending enough on capex to warrant inclusion, he said.