Hyperscalers: The Three Cloud Giants Powering AI's Next Decade

Hyperscalers are companies that own and operate massive data centers. These facilities can house up to several hundred thousand servers, consuming between a few megawatts to several hundred megawatts of electricity per month.

The term hyperscaler is often associated with Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet's Google as they collectively control 63% of the public cloud market. These companies offer remote access to their data center infrastructure, which is largely comprised of hyperscaled facilities capable of handling artificial intelligence work.

Other notable hyperscalers include Meta Platforms (META) and Oracle (ORCL), with China's Alibaba (BABA) and Baidu (BIDU) also making headlines for their large-scale data centers. Apple (AAPL) has fewer AI data centers, but the ones it owns are massive.

While some of these companies have been at the forefront of the hyperscaling industry, there is no specific threshold for computing capacity or power consumption that qualifies a data center as hyperscale. The size and scope of these facilities vary greatly, with some requiring over 100 megawatts of electricity per month to operate.