Experts in data centre finance claim that investment is flooding into the data centre market.
“We’ve never seen a better time in this space for financing,” claimed Paul Vasilopoulos, at Bank Street Group. Typically investment has gone into companies with strong management systems and good track records. This is a hard space to gain investment for start-ups. “You don’t see a lot of new entrants into the market,” stated Brian Thomas at Equinix.
The DatacenterDynamics industry consensus 2011 was based on responses from 5,400 data centre owners from around the world. It found that the data centre market is set to grow by 16% during 2012.
The Western United States will receive the most investment in the form of $3.5 billion, closely followed by the UK at $3.35 billion then China at $3.1 billion. However in terms of percentage growth South East Asia will far outweigh any other part of the world with expected growth of 118%.
In Europe alone the market is set to grow 53% by 2016. Despite the high costs in London new data centre builds, constructed by the likes of TelecityGroup, Interxion and Telehouse Europe have remained prolific.
The findings stipulated that the majority of growth will come from huge surges in the number of internet users and increased consumption of smart phones.
“The world is becoming more IT dependent. Even in developed markets the expansion of IT and internet use in business, government and socially has created a perfect storm for more servers and storage, and more data centres to power, cool and house them,” said DatacenterDynamics Research director Nick Parfitt.
The report found that the majority of investment will be directed at the extension of existing data centres, the construction of new ones and increased outsourcing.
Investment is not necessarily direct. “There’s a lot of money flowing into the data centre space, but sometimes it’s disguised,” said Brian Thomas at Equinix. Money not directly intended for data centre investment is ending up their. Even money being sunk into IPOs such as Zynga, Groupon and LinkedIn is heading toward building new infrastructure.
