What makes a city a hub? And what makes a hub healthy?
Before we answer these questions, we must acknowledge that the interconnection market is not a homogeneous thing. It's an ecosystem comprised of numerous critically interdependent parts, much like a body or a machine.
Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the 2025 State of the Network Report—our eighth edition.
The TeleGeography team spent the last year compiling market surveys, building algorithms, and analyzing emerging trends, and now we're ready to share the highlights.
Welcome back, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners. We took a nice long break for the holidays, and we've returned refreshed with another batch of telecom conversations for your feed.
Our first guest of 2025 is Fahim Sabir, Director of Digital Solutions at Colt.
In November, we unveiled our new Market Connectivity Score (MCS) and dropped our first public rankings of the top ten most connected and fastest-growing cities in the world.
Because we update the MCS quarterly, it's time to see how those rankings have changed.
Our Data Center Research Service estimates that there are 24 metropolitan markets that have more than 1 million square feet of operational data center capacity and four-year CAGR of at least 10%.
Nine of those 24 markets are in Asia and seven are in Europe. Even more extraordinary—four of the Asian markets are in India alone.
The data center market is in the midst of an unprecedented shift that started—publicly at least—five years ago with the announced moratoria on new development in Singapore and Frankfurt. Those regulatory interventions highlighted the challenges the industry faces in securing sufficient power.
Since then, it turned out that data centers would need much more power than had been realized—just at a time when regulators and community organizations were growing increasingly critical of the sector's existing demand.
Our Data Center Research Service estimates that, as of 2024, colocation operators in the top ten data center markets by MW consume about 13 gigawatts (GW) of power.
That's enough power to generate electricity for roughly 10 million homes—or, in this case, only about 1,000 commercial data centers!
Many of the world’s top data center markets face issues such as rising energy costs, connectivity, and in some cases, moratoriums on new data center buildouts.
To help decision-makers navigate these challenges and prepare for the future, we’ve launched the Market Connectivity Score (MCS), a dynamic tool that measures current and potential connectivity and data center market size for 3,000 cities worldwide.
As of Q4 2024, the MCS ranks Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as the fastest-growing city for near-future connectivity infrastructure growth.
When it comes to the nature of exploration, there are typically a number of underlying forces at play, some positive and some negative.
The “pioneering spirit” could be inspired by the excitement of new opportunities, or by the pressure of existing difficulties.
The data center market happens to be dealing with both of those sentiments right now, with several factors driving it to new places.
We're back at it with episode three of our five-part podcast special that explains the nuts and bolts of the internet.
You've come to the right place if you're looking to understand how all of those cat videos travel from the source to your phone.
We explained in episode two how the internet is made of transport networks to carry data over (mostly) fiber optic wires distributed around the world. And in the episode before that, we discussed how the internet is a network of networks operated by thousands of mostly private companies.
But we haven’t yet covered exactly how and where those networks meet and exchange traffic with each other and access their destinations.
So today, it's data center time.
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