What is a hyperscaler?

A hyperscaler is a cloud or internet company that operates at massive scale — hundreds of thousands of servers across dozens of data centres worldwide. The five dominant hyperscalers are AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Meta, and Oracle, with combined annual data centre capex exceeding $250 billion in 2026. Qualifying as a hyperscaler generally means spending $2+ billion per year on data centre infrastructure and operating at multi-gigawatt scale. Hyperscalers both build their own facilities and lease wholesale colocation from third parties, consuming 60-70% of all new data centre capacity globally. Their procurement decisions — where they build, who they lease from, what power they require — shape the entire data centre industry.