Overview:
- Data generation has skyrocketed these past few years – giving rise to the concept of data centers
- Here’s a list of the 8 largest data centers in the world by size and capacity
Introduction
The pandemic has forced our hand – digital transformation is the name of the game in the industry right now. Businesses are looking more and more towards work-from-home as a solution. As a result, expenditure on cloud services saw a record high in the first quarter of 2020. Businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on these digital services. Technologies such as AI, machine learning, etc. are taking the wheel and driving us into a data-driven world.
Reports tell every human creates around 1.7 MB of information each second. This enormous growth in data generation requires a secure facility to store the data. The solution? A data center. It is a dedicated space within a building or a group of buildings used to house computing resources and other components that are associated.
Technavio, a market research firm, suggested that the data center market is expected to grow by 284.44 billion USD during the 2019-2023 period.
So in this article, I have listed down 8 of the largest data centers across the globe.
#8 – Yotta NM1
The NM1 data center, owned by Yotta Infrastructure, a subsidiary of Hiranandani Group, is located in the 600-acre property of Hiranandani Fortune City in Panvel. It occupies one of the five buildings of the Integrated Yotta Data Center Park. The park spreads across 7,84,080 sq. ft. and once fully built, it will offer its customers 30,000 racks.
The NM1 is the largest tier IV certified data center in Asia and the second largest in the world. The data center is user-scalable and is capable of cloud computing, OTT content, and enterprise or government level applications. The building has its own on-site power infrastructure. However, Yotta is aiming to use eco-friendly power sources to power the building in the near future. The company claims that NM1 has the lowest cost per racks.
#7 – QTS Metro Data Center
The QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center is in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It spans over an area of 9,90,000 sq. ft. The building started out as a distribution center for the Sears Southeast region in 1954. Then, QTS bought the building in 2000 and remodeled the building which took six years and $80 million.
This facility has its own on-site Georgia Power substation and direct fiber access to a variety of carrier alternatives. The data center offers on-demand access to 40+ major cloud platforms from 3 SDN providers i.e. Megaport, PacketFabric, and Telia Carrier.
#6 – Lakeside Technology Center
Printing presses for Sears Catalogs and Yellow Book phone books were originally housed in the building which has now been replaced by this data center facility. In 1999 Digital Realty Trust, which owns the Lakeside Technology Center, renovated it for telecom use. The data center lies in Chicago, Illinois covering a huge area of 1.1 million sq. ft. It consumes more than 100 MW of power making it Commonwealth Edison’s largest consumer in Illinois closely followed by Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
Another interesting feature of this facility is its cooling system which uses a refrigerated brine-like liquid stored in an 8.5 million gallon tank. This huge tank also serves as thermal energy storage which further cuts down costs by running chillers during off-peak hours.
IBM, Facebook, CenturyLink, and many more companies are in this data center’s clientele.
#5 – Utah Data Center
The Utah data center which is also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center is situated in Bluffdale, Utah. It covers an area of a whopping 1.5 million sq. ft. It is designed keeping in mind the future scope of digitization and can store data in the order of exabytes or more.
The facility was completed in 2019 and an estimated amount of 1.5 billion USD was spent on the facility’s construction. Due to massive power surges towards the end of its completion, the facility opened after a year’s delay. This facility uses about 65 megawatts of electricity which costs about 40 million USD per year.
#4 – DFT Data Center
DuPont Fabros Technology owns the DFT data center which spans an area of 1.6 million sq. ft. This Tier-3 certified data center is situated in Ashburn, Virginia, USA, and houses 7 data center buildings. Recently built, the 7th data center building ACC7, is the first to use a new design that allows the company to add capacity in smaller chunks. The basic unit is of 5.9 megawatts.
The company’s 11 data centers are located in four major U.S. markets, which total 3.3 million gross square feet and 287 megawatts of the available critical load to power the servers and computing equipment of its customers.
In September 2017, Digital Realty acquired DuPont Fabros Technology.
#3 – Switch SuperNAP
The Switch SuperNap data center is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, the USA covering an area of 3.5 million sq. ft. It is a Tier 4 certified exascale data center facility running on a highly efficient power source costing just 4.9 cents per kWh. The cooling units are also state of the art. They can switch between multiple cooling modes. They also have on-board flywheels to provide more runtime during power outages.
The company provides services including MPLS, IP, Transport, SIP, and SD-WAN to more than 40 cloud computing companies and network carriers.
#2 – Range International Information Group
Range International Information Group’s data center is located in Hubei province in China. It spreads across an area of 6.3 million sq. ft. It is nearly the size of the Pentagon!
Range International Information Group has collaborated with IBM. IBM provides design services, technology, training, solutions, and business applications whereas Range International Information Hub will promote the economic growth of the Langfang zone. Range International claims that this data center of theirs hosts fourth-generation super data centers and cloud computing centers.
#1 – The Citadel
The Citadel, also owned by Switch, is the largest data center campus in the world as of yet. It is located in Tahoe Reno, Nevada, and covers an area of boasting 7.2 million square feet. It also has the largest data center building Tahoe Reno 1 with 1.3 million sq. ft. of space, surpassing the previously held record by Lakeside Technology at 1.1 million sq. ft.
The facility runs on 100% renewable energy at just 4.9 cents per kWh. It also has dedicated 7 ms fiber links to the CORE campus in Las Vegas, Nevada via the Switch SUPERLOOP. The company’s clients are from all business domains, be it technology or healthcare. Some of its top clients are eBay, AWS, Intel, and Boeing.
End Notes
To summarize, in this article we listed 8 of the largest functioning Data Centers across the globe. This list is changing every year with the rise of new Data Centers or expansion of the old ones.
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Do you think we missed any Data Centers? Let us know in the comments below.
