Microsoft Takes the Lead: 300 Data Centers Globally, Surpassing AWS

Cloud computing giants Microsoft and Amazon have made significant strides in expanding their data centre footprints to meet their customers’ ever-growing demands. According to Stocklytics.com, Microsoft has taken the lead with over 300 data centres globally, surpassing AWS. This significant milestone underscores Microsoft’s aggressive expansion strategy in the cloud computing arena.

The site’s financial analyst, Edith Reads, comments:

Microsoft is ramping up its data center footprint to meet the growing demand for high-performance computing (HPC) essential for AI workloads. This includes updating legacy facilities and enhancing infrastructure to support customer needs efficiently. Additionally, Microsoft has partnered with Vodafone to improve data center strategies, aiming to deliver generative AI, digital services, and cloud solutions to over 300 million businesses and consumers in Europe and Africa.”

Stocklytics financial analyst, Edith Reads

Overview of The Cloud Infrastructure Market

Despite Microsoft surpassing AWS in the number of data centres this year, AWS remains a close second with 215 data centres, only slightly behind Microsoft. Google, on the other hand, trails with 25 data centres.

Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services dominate the cloud services market, collectively accounting for 75% of the $76 billion spent on cloud infrastructure services in Q1 2024. AWS leads with a 31% share of the market revenues, a slight decline from 32% in Q1 2023. Microsoft captures around 25% of the market, showing growth from 24% at the end of 2023, indicating a positive trend for the company. Google holds an 11% market share.

Microsoft’s increasing market share, now at 25%, highlights its expanding influence in cloud infrastructure. The slight gain from the previous quarter underscores the firm’s upward trajectory as it builds its cloud capabilities.

In contrast, Meta and Apple have fewer data centres, with 24 and 10, respectively. Despite their lower data centre counts and market shares, these companies and other smaller third parties contribute to a $13.5 billion rise in overall cloud market expenditures—a 21% increase from last year. This surge signals a strong push by tech firms to advance cloud technologies.

Microsoft Future Data Centre Plan

Since July 2023, Microsoft has secured over 500MW of additional data centre space, paving the way for a potential 5GW of IT capacity available for development. Consequently, the company is expected to build twice the number of data centres in Q1 2024 within the next six months, accounting for 1GW of capacity. As a result, Microsoft targets 1.5GW for the first half of 2025.

Moreover, Microsoft has already planned to invest roughly $2.9 billion in data centre infrastructure in Japan and $3.16 billion in the UK for a data centre in North Yorkshire.

Furthermore, Microsoft aims to increase its geographically distributed data centres to bring services closer to customers, reduce network latency, and allow geo-redundant backup and failover.