The global edge data center market revenue stood at $5.3 billion in 2019, and it is expected to surge to $53.1 billion by 2030. Furthermore, the market will advance at a CAGR of 25.4% from 2020 to 2030, as per the estimates of the market research company, P&S Intelligence. The market is being driven by the rapid 5G commercialization, increasing over-the-top (OTT) traffic and mobile data traffic, and the surging demand for internet of things (IoT) devices across the world.
The increasing adoption of smartphones and IoT devices is fueling the soaring mobile data traffic, which is, in turn, propelling the requirement for edge data centers. This is because these centers are required for managing the huge volumes of data being generated all over the world. Moreover, the growing popularity of OTT platforms, on account of the rising demand for online content, is augmenting the generation of data. As conventional data centers are usually located far away from users, OTT content experiences latency issues frequently, which affects the viewer experience.
Thus, in order to reduce the time taken for data transmission from the source to the destination and provide an uninterrupted OTT experience, OTT platforms are increasingly focusing on establishing edge data centers near users. This is causing the growth of the edge data center market. Depending on component, the market is divided into solutions and services categories. Between these, the solutions category contributed higher revenue to the market in 2019.
The solutions category is further sub-divided into power & uninterruptible power supply (UPS), cooling, IT racks & enclosure, storage, networking equipment, and data center infrastructure management categories. Out of these, the power & UPS category held the largest share, because of the huge demand for backup and prime power at data centers. Additionally, the huge investments made in research and development (R&D) activities in the domain of UPS technologies also contributed to the expansion of the category.
When organization is taken into consideration, the edge data center market is classified into large enterprises and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Of these, the SMEs category is currently holding the larger market share, because of the soaring investments being made in the development of edge data centers by various SMEs across the world. Additionally, these organizations are predicted to rapidly incorporate edge data center solutions in the forthcoming years, on account of the fact that they are witnessing robust digitalization and providing online services, that require data-intensive applications.
Geographically, the edge data center market is expected to exhibit the fastest growth in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in the coming years. This is credited to the increasing internet penetration in the developing nations of APAC such as China, Indonesia, and India and rapid digitization in the region. As per the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), there were more than 504 million internet users in India in November 2019, which was 12% more than the number reported in March 2019.
Hence, it can be said without any hesitation that the market will expand massively in the upcoming years, mainly because of the increasing internet penetration, rising popularity of OTT services, surging smartphone usage, and soaring adoption of IoT devices around the world.
