10 Data Center Companies You Need To Watch In 2023

Hyperscalers and enterprise data center growth is projected to continue to race higher as digital transformation drives demand for the bedrock technology.

The multi-cloud world is here and data center and colocation vendors are experiencing massive growth as the surging popularity of IoT, 5G networks and streaming content fuel an unrelenting demand for capacity.

In fact, over the next four years the U.S. data center construction market is expected to grow at a 3-percent compound annual rate, according to a study by Arizton Advisory & Intelligence.

Arizton’s analysis projects that 2.8 gigawatts of capacity will by added at a cost of around $25 billion by 2027, and a physical footprint of 20-million square feet.

With hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook driving about 90 percent of the expansion, enterprise data centers are being built now in high-demand areas such as Washington D.C., and the Pacific Northwest to leverage the lowest latency possible for the highest number of customers.

But its not just the massive players like Equinix and Digital Realty who find success.

Smaller provides like Aligned Data Centers, and Evocative are building their networks though acquisition in international territories and construction at home.

But even among the biggest names with the best balance sheets, change is constant.

Digital Realty’s longtime CEO, Bill Stein, was cut suddenly “without cause” in December after nearly 18 years with the company. Stein had just led the company to record bookings in three of its last four quarters. He was replaced by CFO Andrew Power. Stein was also the company’s CFO from 2004 to 2014.

Meanwhile companies like TierPoint and Flexential, while smaller than rivals, are making huge bets on 2023 with millions dedicated to new construction and enhancements to their data center practices.

Here are some of the most exciting data center companies to watch in 2023:

Aligned Data Centers

Why you should watch: The company is growing globally through acquisition and building new space in competitive markets at home.

The Dallas-based provider of what it calls sustainable and adaptable data center enterprise infrastructure solutions grew not just its physical footprint last year with 470 megawatts in construction started or planned, but it also acquired Latin American data center provider ODATA in December.

This year the company announced construction of a 27-acre, 108-megawatt facility in the competitive Hillsboro, Ore. area.

“Hillsboro offers a business-friendly environment, affordable power and renewable energy options, diverse metro and long-haul connectivity to major cities and tech hubs such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, as well as proximity to international subsea cable networks that reduce latency between the U.S. and high-growth markets in the Asia-Pacific region,” CEO Andrew Schaap said in a statement.

ODATA is one of the fastest growing hyperscale data center platforms in that region with locations across Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Chile.

Aligned said the combination gives the new company room for growth, regional expertise, and partnerships across geographies. The move should give the new company a more robust supply chain to help its enterprise and hyperscale customers, CEO Andrew Schaap said in a statement at the time of the deal.

“The acquisition combines a significant growth runway for expansion and a proven ability to deliver capacity at maximum speed, with regional expertise and partnerships, enhanced fiscal resources, and a resilient supply chain, to deliver a world-class data center platform that meets the demands of our global hyperscale and enterprise customers,” Schaap said in a statement.

The company opened two data center facilities in Phoenix with a combined 400 megawatt capacity. It also has sites under construction in Dallas, Chicago, northern Virginia, Frederick County, Md., and Salt Lake City.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Why you should watch: As the elephant in a room of elephants, the hyperscaler is poised to add billions to the data center market.

The largest hyperscaler has built a massive data center infrastructure globally, with more than 87 locations, adding new regions in the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, India, and Thailand last year.

In India, AWS plans to invest $4.4 billion by 2030. Leaders there said the country must increase the nation’s cloud computing capacity from 565 megawatts to 2.5 gigawatts and it is counting on AWS to help.

“Data centers are an important element of the digital ecosystem. AWS’ investment in expanding their data centers in India is a welcome development that would help catalyze India’s digital economy,” said Shri Rajeev Chandrashekhar, union minister of state electronics and information.

AWS also announced a partnership that gives Atos customers with large scale outsourcing contracts to accelerate workload migration to the cloud.

Atos last year moved away from hosting its own data centers.

Atos selected AWS as its preferred enterprise cloud provider. Over the next three years Atos will train employees to achieve 20,000 AWS certifications.

Atos

Why you should watch: After shedding its legacy data center business, the company is reinventing itself as a leader in data center outsourcing.

While making a move two years ago to focus more on cloud, Atos managed to boost its number of cloud instances by 25-percent to 73,500 last year, according to Gartner. Meanwhile Atos’ ERP hosting is used by a little over four million SAP users, which increased in 2022 by 3 percent, and 794,000 Oracle users, up 18 percent. The metrics were enough to position it as a leader in data center outsourcing and hybrid infrastructure managed services.

‘’We have invested in the right comprehensive set of service and the develomentn of our people’s skills to effectively support our clients run vaiours workloads on different clouds, thereby meeting their expectations for business outcome based automated sovereign and secure cloud services,” Deputy CEO Nourdine Bihmane said in a statement.

The company has strong cloud investments, particularly the Atos OneCloud solution, which it started in 2021, with a plan to spend $2 billion over five years and deliver consulting, application transformation, and prebuilt cloud accelerators to help customers navigate their public cloud.

In October, the company announced that it was approached by several players interested in buying its Tech Foundations business. A deal for that has not yet emerged.

CoreSite – An American Tower Company

Why you should watch: The company continues to drive strong demand after being bought out by American Tower.

After CoreSite was purchased last year for $10.1 billion by wireless infrastructure provider American Tower, demand for its data center remains strong, the company said in a recent earnings call.

“As we look out we expect workloads to become even more distributed and localized,” President and CEO Tom Bartlett said. “Therefore we see the importance of an interconnection hub like CoreSite increasing as customers look to future-proof their digital businesses.”

To that end, CoreSite recently bought a 103,000 square foot data center in Miami. The building brings the company’s total space in the city to 150,000 square feet. The new facility is built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane and is meant to give CoreSite customers in the storm-prone region reliable infrastructure.

Digital Realty

Why you should watch: As one of the largest data center providers in the world, Digital Realty suddenly fired its CEO, Bill Stein -- an 18-year company veteran -- in December and promoted its CFO to president and CEO.

Digital Realty opens up the new year at the start of leadership transition. In December, it fired its CEO, Bill Stein, “without cause” and “effective immediately,” then promoted the company’s CFO Andrew Power.

In a press release, Digital Realty’s board chairman Mary Hogan Preusse wished Stein “all the best.”

“I want to thank Bill for this exemplary leadership and congratulate him on the tremendous success he has achieved for Digital Realty,” she said, according to a statement. Then she turned her praise to incoming CEO Power.

Power has been president of the company since 2021.

In its most recent quarter, Austin, Texas-based Digital Realty posted revenues of $1.2 billion, up 5 percent sequentially and year over year. It delivered a record quarter for bookings, its third bookings record in the last four quarters.

The company is not afraid to make big moves, having closed one of the largest data center purchases in history when it snapped up data center giant InterXion for $8.4 billion in 2020. That move gave Digital Realty 53 facilities in 11 European countries.

Equinix

Why you should watch: A global player and one of the largest data center providers in the world is growing in critical markets such as Africa.

Equinix grew significantly by acquisition in 2022, closing on more than $1 billion worth of deals around the globe.

In West Africa, the company last April closed on its acquisition of MainOne for $320 million lassoing four data centers with 64,000 square feet of space that provides services to Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivorie. MainOne, now an Equinix company, continues under the leadership of CEO Funke Opeke.

Then, in December, Equinix announced it would expand its footprint on the continent with a $160 million investment in Johannesburg.

“We entered the African continent earlier this year with the acquisition of MainOne, the leading West African data center and connectivity solutions provider with presence in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d‘Ivoire,“ said Eugene Bergen, president of EMEA at Equinix. ”This investment will give both South African businesses the opportunity to expand internationally and global businesses to expand into South Africa.”

Additionally, Equinix purchased five data centers from Entel in Chile and Perum with acquisitions totaling $720 million.

Evocative

Why you should watch: The up and comer just bought rival INAP, bagging 1 million square foot of space over nine data centers.

The San Jose, Calif.-based data center provider has been on an acquisition spree buying nine of INAP data centers in September. The acquisition brought the company’s total number of neutral Tier II and Tier III data centers in the US to 20 comprising more than 1 million square feet of space.

“Our team has built a leading infrastructure organization that has reached a new milestone with 20 carrier-neutral facilities to support our new and existing customers’ businesses,” Arman Khalili, Founder & CEO of Evocative said in a statement. “In addition to the facilities, we are very happy to welcome new team members from INAP to Evocative. Each of us plays an important role in providing our full suite of digital infrastructure solutions to our customers and we look forward to expanding our team.”

Evocative offers enterprise-class data center, bare metal, network, cloud and managed service solutions for its 68,000 servers strategically located across North America, Europe and Asia.

The company has said its goal for 2023 is to focus on its providing best-in-class IT infrastructure combined with a full suite of services wrapped around its solutions.

Flexential

Why You Should Watch: The company’s unwavering channel focus, as well as massive investments in building its national capacity and cloud presence.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based company is continuing to find success with its FlexAnywhere product, a hybrid IT solution that leverages cloud, even as it grows its traditional data center footprint.

In 2022, Flexential launched new builds in Hillsboro, Ore., where it added 54-megawatts of capacity to expand its total capacity for that region to 100-megawatts.

Meanwhile it also grew its low-latency, high performance hybrid-cloud capabilities at three data centers in Charlotte, Nashville and Louisville.

That expansion gave Flexential a total of 10 enabled data centers for cloud customers which provide lower latency communications across workloads and applications. The data centers provide those capabilities while reaching a broader base of end-users, the company said.

“In this rapidly evolving, digital-first technology landscape, it’s critical that we support our customers’ ability to deliver superior application performance and position them for success in the market,” Felxential chief operating officer Ryan Mallory said in a company statement. “This expansion is just one example of Flexential’s commitment to partner with customers to ensure their IT infrastructure meets their unique business needs and enables them to manage mission-critical workloads efficiently and effectively.”

Stack Infrastructure

Why you should watch: The company is taking big swings in an important market, competing against larger players.

Stack Infrastructure said it has nearly 1 gigawatt of data center capacity built or under construction in the Washington, D.C. area giving it a huge opportunity in a region that needs the available space.

The company just bought 74 acres of land in December in Prince William County, with that addition able to support another 100 megawatts of capacity which is expected to bring one of its newest data center campus’ total availability to 250 megawatts.

“Stack has again capitalized on its industry-leading expertise and deep local relationships to deliver capacity in the world’s most coveted power and land-constrained market,” said Stack CEO Brian Cox in a statement. “This new campus adds to Stack’s already significant presence in Prince William County and is Stack’s latest demonstration of our commitment to continuously delivering scalable solutions for our clients in strategic locations across the globe.”

Stack announced three new data center campus projects last year, including a 216-megawatt campus in Virginia, a 56-megawatt campus in Toronto, a 36-megawatt campus in Japan, and a flagship Portland campus with 200 megawatt of current and expansion capacity.

Stack expanded into Europe and Asia Pacific last year, a move it that makes the company one of the largest global private data center operators worldwide, the company said. Stack’s offerings include numerous concurrent projects in key regions throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific, and EMEA.

TierPoint

Why you should watch: TierPoint launched its private cloud on Dell APEX with VxRail, while continuing to grow its physical space with a Tier III data center in St. Louis.

The data center provider won a $500 million investment from Argo Infrastructure Partners in February, then launched its private cloud service later in the year. The investment, CEO Jerry Kent said, signaled the strength of TierPoint’s financials and outstanding customer service.

“It validates the steps we’re taking to augment our suite of leading IT infrastructure solutions and team of world-class technology professionals. Argo’s investment strengthens our position in an industry experiencing great demand for our network and services and adds to the long runway of growth ahead of us,” his statement read.

In August, the company finished construction on a Tier III data center in St. Louis and announced that World Wide Technology had signed on as an anchor tenant. TierPoint runs 40 data centers in the US, along with a comprehensive portfolio of IT infrastructure solutions.

Also in August, TierPoint launched its own private cloud on Dell APEX, which features Private Cloud Powered by VxRail, for faster provisioning and shorter subscription terms.