Hyperscale and enterprise IT spend grew 9% in 2022, telco capex fell

Hyperscalers increased their capital expenditures by nine percent in 2022, Synergy Research found.

That increase was matched by enterprises, which also increased their IT infrastructure investments by nine percent.

But telecoms companies saw their capex spend drop by around four percent.

Across all three groups, infrastructure spending in 2022 reached $700 billion. Hyperscale companies accounted for 29 percent of the total, up from just 13 percent in 2016. Synergy counts nineteen companies as hyperscale, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Alibaba, and ByteDance.

Enterprises also accounted for 29 percent, but they also accounted for 29 percent in 2016, showing less growth. Telco share has fallen from 58 percent in 2016 to 42 percent in 2022, but the biggest spenders of the year were China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, AT&T, NTT, and China Telecom

Over the six years, hyperscale capex has grown by an average of 20 percent per year, while enterprise IT spending has grown by an average of six percent, and telco capex has been flat. Overall, spending has increased by an average six percent per year since 2016.

“For hyperscale operators, the boom in cloud services and continued growth in other digital services is driving ongoing growth in spending,” John Dinsdale, the chief analyst at Synergy, said. “The enterprise picture is more complex. Hosted and cloud collaboration has been a long-term driver of growth, as has network security.

“There has also been something of a post-pandemic bounce back for both enterprise data centers and switches, the former being helped by higher costs due to supply chain issues that are being passed on in the form of higher ASPs. For equipment and software vendors, the good news is that overall IT infrastructure spending will continue to grow steadily over the next five years.” Data Center Dynamics