China Is Home To The Second Largest Amount Of Data Centres In The World

China hosts 10 percent of the world’s major cloud and internet data centres, helping the country get its massive population of 1.4 billion online over the next few decades.

However the country still trails the United States, which accounts for 44 percent of the major data centres that power the world’s Internet.

John Dinsdale, research director at Synergy Research Group, the firm behind the findings, said that the results highlight China’s exceptional features in the internet market.

Scale

“The country distribution of major data centres clearly reflects two things – the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies; and the scale and unique characteristics of the Chinese market,” said Dinsdale.

Synergy’s research, which looked at data centre locations by country in the second quarter of 2015, also found that Australia, the UK, Japan, and Singapore equally stake a 5 percent market share each of data centres.

Germany and the Netherlands get 4 percent each, whilst other countries make up the remaining 18 percent.

“The ranking also reflects the relative importance of smaller countries that are often used as regional hubs – Hong Kong, Singapore, Netherlands and Ireland,” said Dinsdale.

“Until recently India was an omission from the list but Microsoft has just opened its first major cloud data centres in the country and both AWS and IBM will soon be following suit.”

Alibaba

Aliyun, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s cloud computing division, is behind some of these Chinese data centres. Looking to take on Amazon Web Services as a global cloud player, Aliyun has ramped up efforts recently to expand and build data centres.

Its latest, announced just last month, is a data centre in Qiandao Lake, 225 miles from Shanghai in China’s Zhejiang Province, that will use local reservoir water for cooling.

The Aliyun Qiandao Lake Data Centre is said to incorporate a number of enivironmental designs that keep the data centre as green as it can be, in line with Alibaba’s self-professed “focus on sustainability”.

The data centre is Aliyun’s eighth globally, and follows a series of cloud announcements that have made clear Alibaba’s intentions of taking on Amazon Web Services.

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