Data center infrastructure spending still growing as cloud providers keep buying
Public cloud providers are quickly becoming the biggest buyers of data center infrastructure equipment, as purchasing of hardware and software both rebounded sharply in 2021, according to a recent report by Synergy Research Group.
Overall spending grew by roughly 10% in year-on-year terms, reaching a total of $185 billion in 2021. The lion’s share of that spending was on hardware, according to Synergy, with 77% of the total spend going towards servers, storage and networking gear. Software, including operating systems, cloud management, virtualization and network security, made up the rest of the total.