Where is the world’s largest data center?

Where is the world’s largest data center? The question sounds fairly easy, so you might think the only thing between you and the answer is a quick Google search. The reality, however, is far more complicated, as data centers tend to be quite secretive about their sizes.

The largest data center in the Baltics. Photo by: Tõnu Tunnel.

The ‘million square metre’ data center in China

According to the Internet, the world’s largest data center in the world is the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, founded by a Chinese-state owned communications company. The three-billion-dollar facility is said to be in Hohhot, to cover an area of a million square metres and to consume 150 MW of energy in six data halls. For comparison: a million square metres is over 94 standard-sized football fields.

More has been written about similar centers in China throughout the years, but so far, not many such claims have been confirmed. The actual scope of the China Telecom data center is not confirmed, either. The company itself is also not willing to confirm or deny claims about its scope, according to DatacenterDynamics.

Satellite photos show that the so-called world’s largest data center consists of six four-storey buildings, each of them approximately 89 metres long and 46 metres wide. A quick calculation shows that the area of each building is 17,444 square metres, so all six cover just over 100,000 square metres. It is undoubtedly a lot, but it is almost 10 times less than the one million square metres reported in the media. It should be said that the satellite photos do not show how much of this space is actually used for data management.

Several of the next places in the ranking of the world’s largest data centers also seem to belong to China, but there are not many confirmed facts. The alleged runner-up is also located in Hohhot and is said to be 715,000 square metres, but this story might also be exaggerated. Satellite photos do not confirm this information, either – it seems that the construction of the center has not yet been completed.

The situation is similar with the data centers of China Mobile. Companies often report the total size which the facility may grow to, based on what the planning permit says or what sounds good to investors. They then gradually grow, hoping to reach this final number. Whether or when they actually reach it is not that important at first. In China, reaching the goal is rendered difficult by the fact that there are twice as many data facilities as needed in the north-eastern part of the country. Demand simply cannot keep up with the companies’ utopian plans.

Centrin data center in Wuhan

Another potential mega data center can be found in China – the Centrin data center in Wuhan. The company, which recently partnered with SpaceDC, claims it has an area of around 207,000 square metres. The facility, however, is not ready – it is only in the first phase, with a total IT load of 70 MW and hopes to grow to 225 MW.

Huawei data center

Another potentially huge data center is that of Huawei, located in the Gui’an New Area in the province of Guizhou in south-west China. The Chinese telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics company often designs its campuses in an almost fairy-tale rendition of European architecture based on the façades in Prague.

This quirky campus looks more like a Disney theme park or Hollywood movie complex, but the company claims that it is home to a million servers. If local media is to be believed, the campus is currently 480,000 square metres in size. This does not mean, however, that all of it is spent on data storage: the campus also has 98 training rooms, research and development laboratories, a base for IT maintenance engineers, etc. The Huawei data center is reportedly visited by 10,000 people a year, which is significantly more than any normal data center.

It is probably not the largest data center in the world, but Huawei gets style points for being one of the most peculiar.

The largest data center in Japan

Without a doubt, the AT TOKYO Chuo data center in Japan is among the world’s largest. Its total area is 140,000 square metres and this time, it really is a fact. At its core, it is just a hefty cube in the middle of Tokyo.

AT TOKYO is the largest data center building in all of Japan. But is it the world’s largest?

The NSA data center

Let us move on to the United States. One of the USA’s largest data repositories belongs to the National Security Agency – the infamous NSA. The government agency, managed by the US Department of Defense, has tried to keep most of its data center in Utah a secret, but as it is a massive building, they have not been entirely successful.

The data center is believed to comprise two large buildings, each with two halls, and surrounding infrastructure with an area of around 139,000 square metres. However, only 9,300 square metres of this is believed to be the data center, with over 84,000 square metres of technical support and administration space.

Chicago data hotel

One of the largest data center companies is Digital Realty, which owns the Lakeside Technology Center. It is a massive ‘hotel’ operating in Chicago with over 70 tenants. The building’s area is 102,200 square metres, but the question is whether we should consider one building that houses many data center companies as one location or as several different ones.

The largest data center in Europe

There are also data centers in Europe – quite a few of them, in fact – but they fall short of the rest of the world in terms of size. According to various sources, Europe’s largest data center is in Portugal and is owned by the largest telecommunications company in the country, Altice Portugal (formerly Portugal Telecom). The center is just under 75,000 square metres in size.

The Altice Portugal data center is notable for not only being the biggest, but also one of the most environmentally conscious data centers in Europe. Namely, the center has a rainwater collection system and a garden with over 600 trees. Solar energy is also produced on site. The center was strategically placed in the city of Covilhã, the coolest place in Portugal. This way, the center can use free cooling 99% of the time. We have previously written in our blog about why temperature is one of the most important risks in device accommodation.

Facebook’s data giant

It should come as no surprise that one of the world’s largest social media platforms requires a lot of space to store data. Facebook has built several huge data centers around the world, the largest of which is located in Prineville, Oregon, USA. Facebook’s data warehouse spans over nine buildings and 344,000 square metres – and it keeps growing. By 2023, the company plans to open two more halls of 41,800 square metres and this time, they will both have two floors. This would make a total of 427,000 square metres.

But already in its current form, it can be said that the world’s largest data center cluster belonging to one brand is Facebook’s Prineville data campus.

But what could be the largest singular data center building? Facebook might win this one too – its 170,000 square metre 11-storey data center in Singapore (although it is currently still in the first phase).

Giants of the future

In the future, Facebook might be dethroned by the Switch Citadel data campus. Switch is a company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It develops and manages the SUPERNAP data center facilities and offers colocation capabilities, telecommunications, cloud services, etc. Once finished, the Switch campus would include 12 data centers, 650 MW, and up to 761,800 square metres of data center space. This would undoubtedly make it the largest data center complex in the world.

However, it is not completely finished, and the infamous ‘up to’ leaves lots of wiggle room. The campus currently has 120,800 square metres of functioning data centers. This means that it is already a huge data repository, but not the largest. Switch also has its own 250,800 square metre data repository in Las Vegas, which currently has a leg up on their own future plans. For now.

Estonia’s largest data center

For a long time, there was no building or complex built as a large-scale data center in the Baltics. This error was corrected in February this year, when Greenergy Data Centers opened in Hüüru, near Tallinn. It is the most secure, reliable, and undoubtedly the largest data center to date in this region.

The data center of Greenergy Data Centers can fit two football fields’ worth of devices and the electrical connections of the complex could power a medium-sized Estonian city. The area of the first completed building is 14,500 square metres and there will be two more buildings like that one.

The construction of the data center near Tallinn was financed by the investment fund of the Three Seas Initiative. One of the fund’s investors is also the Estonian state.

Does size even matter?

The short answer: yes.

‘Size often means efficiency, which is highly important in the context of ambitious climate-related goals and the energy crisis. It is predicted that data centers will make up 10 per cent or more of the global energy consumption by 2030. Size also provides the opportunity to expand your business and use additional data center space. It makes more sense, economically speaking, for large-scale players to implement technological innovations, ensure compliance with internationally recognised standards, and attract connection providers to their premises,’ the Sales Director of Greenergy Data Centers, Urmo Kanger, lists the advantages resulting from volume. Therefore, it can be said with complete certainty that we will continue to hear about large data centers in the future.