Global Data Centers
Data centers are still viewed as a niche real estate asset class, but transparency and liquidity are improving as the sector grows.
Similar to other regions, the European data center market has been a beneficiary of global demand drivers such as structural changes, growth in cloud services, e-commerce and remote working and learning, as described in the global section earlier. Established economic centers in developed countries like the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany have continued to scale up their data center markets as both demand and supply grow.
The surge in data creation and traffic has translated into data center demand in Europe,26 which reached record levels of 200 MW per annum during the past three years, led by strong absorption from cloud providers (exhibit EU1). Since 2016, all four major data center markets in the region have seen significant growth in demand.
Data centers are still viewed as a niche real estate asset class, but transparency and liquidity are improving as the sector grows.
Overall data center demand growth has been solid in recent years, keeping average vacancy rates in the United States at 8 to 12% since 2014.
Asia Pacific's data center sector has been benefiting from the growth of internet traffic as the usage by both individual and corporate users rose.