Data shows the cloud goes where the money is

Hyperscale cloud providers have opened numerous operating regions in all corners of the world over the past decade. The three most prominent — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — now have 105 distinct regions (excluding government and edge locations) for customers to choose from to locate their applications and data. Over the next year, this will grow to 130 regions. Other large cloud providers such as IBM, Oracle and Alibaba are also expanding globally, and this trend is likely to continue.

Each region requires enormous investments in data centers, IT, software, people, and networks. The opening of a region may both develop and disrupt the digital infrastructure of the countries involved. This Update, part of Uptime Intelligence's series of publications explaining and examining the development of the cloud, shows how investment can be tracked — and, to a degree, predicted — by looking at the size of the markets involved.