The 2022 Data Center 50

The data center market landscape has changed considerably over the past few years as financial investment firms and cloud giants are leading the industry compared with data center operators themselves.

“The level of data center investment required is too much for even the biggest data center operators, causing an influx of new money from external investors,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, recently told CRN. “Over the last 18 months there has been a very notable shift in buyers, with private equity investors becoming a lot more active than data center operators.”

Although private equity firms and cloud leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google are pouring billions into data centers every quarter, there is still growth ahead for the major data center infrastructure hardware, software and colocation providers.

Worldwide data center systems revenue is expected to reach $226 billion in 2022, representing annual growth of nearly 5 percent year over year, according to IT research firm Gartner. Global data center systems spending is expected to grow another 5 percent in 2023, reaching $237 billion, Gartner predicts.

Many of the data center market leaders are currently transitioning from a Capex sales model to a consumption-based, as-a-service sales motion for key products such as servers, storage and networking hardware, while at the same time striving to boost artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning capabilities inside data centers.

From the world’s largest providers of data center hardware and software to the cloud data center giants building new centers across the globe, CRN breaks down the 50 most important data center companies in 2022.