Shanghai and Beijing among global top 10 data centers

According to a recent industry report, Shanghai and Beijing are among the world’s top 10 data centers by total market size.

Shanghai is now the world’s fourth-largest data center with a market capacity of nearly 0.6 gigawatts, surpassed only by Northern Virginia in the United States, Tokyo, and London, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2021 Global Data Center Market Comparison report that covers 48 data center markets around the world. Beijing ranks 10th.

“The pandemic accelerated changes in corporate information technology strategies, as companies rapidly shifted to the cloud,” said Dave Fanning, executive managing director and data center advisory group leader at Cushman & Wakefield. “Construction of new products has skyrocketed. In last year’s report, 1.6 gigawatts of data were under construction in markets we studied, which increased to 2.9 gigawatts in this year’s edition.”

Datacenter rack space demand has grown considerably in China in recent years, and the cloud sector is drawing considerable attention. Much of the demand comes from Internet companies and application developers, such as e-commerce businesses, multimedia content providers, digital payment enterprises, and location-based service application developers.

Looking ahead, there will be a greater need for data and information processing racks in data centers around China, spurred on by the impact of COVID-19 on Internet activity, as well as the accelerated development of the cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the utilization of 5G networks. By the end of 2022, Kezhi Consulting predicts the market value of data centers in China will exceed 320 billion yuan (US$49.5 billion).

Within the Asia-Pacific, Sydney and Singapore are among the global top 10 data center markets in overall rankings.

Cushman & Wakefield’s study evaluated 1,189 data centers around the world using a unique weighted methodology.