Edge, APAC, managed third party cloud, M&A, geopolitics
The sector saw activity across edge and managed cloud and services, while data centres continued to expand at a rapid clip, with a number of notable developments coming out of the APAC region.
Edge computing continues to show momentum and live deployments are coming online. These deployments involve partnership and coordination from many different parts of the ecosystem. Data centre operator Flexential partnered with American Tower and will build out edge sites at the base of wireless towers in Denver and Atlanta. CDNs are also moving into edge and have a clear path based on the strong foundation they have with existing global network footprints. Limelight has been moving in this direction and recently signed a new edge compute customer.
The managed hosting and cloud space saw a number of developments. On the managed third party cloud side, Mission partnered with AlertLogic for security on the AWS platform, Velocity is pushing harder into this market, while Rackspace won a customer in the UK for the Google Cloud platform. In other hosting developments, Liquid Web released a new cloud hosting service and HostPapa acquired another small SMB hoster.
The global cloud build out continues to push data centre development activity and wins are steady. Iron Mountain, for example, signed a pre-lease in Phoenix that follows its recent wins in Frankfurt and Singapore. Meanwhile, Vantage is building in NoVA and Silicon Valley and Green Mountain brought online a data hall in Norway.
The builds continue to get bigger and APAC is no exception. AirTrunk has had success with large multi-MW builds in Australia and revealed plans to build a hyperscale data centre campus in Tokyo. Elsewhere in APAC, GDS agreed to acquire a hyperscale data centre in Beijing and Actis and GS Group formed a JV for a multi-MW build in South Korea.
Finally, Oracle has been busy in recent weeks and rolled out a new US Top Secret cloud region as it agreed to take a minority stake in TikTok, which positions it to win a significant amount of cloud infrastructure business. Oracle Cloud now serves TikTok and Zoom, arguably two of the most popular platforms today.
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