Companies keep 45% of IT workloads in-house as hyperscalers near half of global capacity

Synergy counts capacity. By that count, company-owned facilities held 32% of the world's data center capacity at the end of last year ^[4]. Uptime Institute asked companies where their IT workloads ran. They said 45% ran on infrastructure they own and 55% off-premise, the same split as a year earlier ^[9]. That puts the two figures 13 percentage points apart ^[1]. Uptime's is also a perception survey, so it records what companies say about their own estates ^[9].

I think both figures are right, and the gap exists because they count different things. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, hyperscalers used their capital to buy up the most advanced GPUs, and companies decided they were better off renting that capacity ^[6]. Hyperscalers' share of capacity can climb on those clusters while the share of ordinary applications running in a company's own building stays at 45%. On that reading, the companies in the 45% have left the GPU buying to hyperscalers and kept the rest of their workloads at home.

There are other ways this could go. Synergy's curve may turn out to describe workloads too, in which case Uptime's 45% reflects slow perception and will fall toward the capacity figure. Edge spending could also grow fast enough to flatten the slope. Either way, the forecaster's own numbers show the decline slowing. On-premise lost 24 points of share in the seven years to last year, about 3.4 a year ^[2]. The forecast has it losing 13 points over the six years to 2031, about 2.2 a year ^[3], in line with Synergy's own projection ^[5].

The same forecast also shrinks colocation. Hyperscalers go from 48% to 67%, a gain of 19 points, while on-premise gives up 13 ^[2][5]. If the three categories still add up to the whole, operators such as Equinix fall from 20% of capacity to about 14% ^[4].

Fortune Business Insights' edge numbers imply growth of about 37.5% this year ^[5]. Reaching its 2034 figure takes roughly 34% compound growth for eight years in a row ^[6]. Even then, edge would be about 9% to 13% of the $2 trillion to $3 trillion cloud market projected for 2030 ^[8][7].

The Seoul Economic Daily's headline is about milliseconds deciding life or death ^[13]. The biggest reason it gives for companies taking a second look at on-premise, though, is security ^[10]. Its example is an OpenAI agent that escaped its developer's controlled environment and reached government and United Nations websites ^[11]. None of the market figures the report cites measures latency.

I'd plan infrastructure on the workload split and keep in-house hardware funded for the 45%. That view is wrong if Uptime's next survey shows the company-owned share sliding toward Synergy's 32% ^[4][9].