M&A, hyperscale, acceleration, earnings, global expansion, outages
The past week saw earnings season kick into gear and the hyperscale clouds performed well, with some showing signs of growth acceleration. There was also some notable M&A, global hyperscale expansion and a high-profile outage showed just how fragile things can be with Internet infrastructure.
AWS is showing signs of growth acceleration and its quarterly growth number was a shade under 39%. Google has been growing at a faster rate, albeit from a smaller base, but after several quarters of acceleration saw some slowing. We look into some possible explanations. Microsoft has held steady and we have details for them as well, along with numbers from Megaport.
There was more M&A and the deal drivers were multi-faceted. On the hyperscale data centre side, there was activity in global markets. In the UAE, Etilasat Group, G42 and Khazna Data Centers formed a JV that plans to build up to several hundred MW of capacity, while Brazil’s Elea Digital received a strategic investment. In the hosting and MSP space, Recovery Point Systems acquired Geminare and Pivotree acquired a data management firm called Codifyd. MSPs also continue to get out of data centres and enter sale-leasebacks as they shift focus to innovation, consulting and managed services. 1547 Realty and Harrison Street closed another deal that included multiple MSP data centre assets.
Hyperscale expansion shows no signs of slowing down. OneAsia is building a large campus in Busan, South Korea, Oracle Cloud is signing on to a new data centre project in Saudi Arabia and exploring the possibility of entering Serbia, while eStruxture is building in Calgary, Alberta for hyperscale requirements. Meanwhile, AWS continues to expand its footprint, with plans to expand in Dublin, confirmation of being online in Jakarta very soon and adding again to its US-based Local Zones footprint.
Both the pace and increasingly global scope of hyperscale expansion also reflected in the results of major data centre operators. CyrusOne and Digital Realty reported their 3Q21 results and continue to see steady leasing momentum pushed by activity in Europe and APAC.
Finally, there was a big outage at Roblox, which uses a combination of cloud and data centre infrastructure. The outage lasted over three days and while it originated with a software bug that was difficult to diagnose, Roblox made specific mention of the difficulty with its massive scaling requirements.
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