50 years ago investment in transcontinental communications cables was driven by telcos. These days investment is driven by content providers, especially those supplying video content. And that trend has escalated since about 2020, according to TeleGeography data.
Video content drives bandwidth demand, and also creates the owners’ economics that incentivize content providers to own, build and operate their own transport networks.
In a similar way, data centers frequently now are built specifically for a relative handful of anchor tenants who are hyperscale cloud computing suppliers.
To be sure, data center business models can use either retail or wholesale models. But one salient difference is that some wholesale data center business plans are built on the assumption that there are a handful of potential customers, namely the hyperscale app providers.
That is not to deny that larger enterprises might be tenants at many wholesale data centers. It is to say that the anchor tenants will be a small number of hyperscalers.
New wholesale data center investments will be significant in Asia, for example.
Among the many changes to the connectivity industry over the past 40 years is a shift of capacity investment to content providers and hyperscale cloud computing suppliers; a shift of media types to video; emergence of remote computing and the impact that has on computing architectures, data center requirements and connectivity locations.
Broadly, the internet ecosystem now drives capital investment in computing and connectivity. Connectivity providers are simply a part of that broader ecosystem.
No comments:
Post a Comment