With the increasing penetration of the internet and the surging mobile data traffic, the demand for edge data centers is growing rapidly all over the world. The soaring adoption of internet of things (IoT)-based devices and smartphones is one of the major factors responsible for the surge in mobile data traffic around the world. This is, in turn, pushing up the demand for edge data centers, as these centers are required for managing the mushrooming data volumes.

According to a recent report produced by the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2017–2022 in February 2019, the total mobile data traffic all over the world was around 26.8 exabytes per month in 2019 and it is expected to rise to more than 77.5 exabytes per month by 2022. Apart from this factor, the increasing over-the-top (OTT) traffic around the world is also fueling the demand for edge data centers.

The ballooning requirement for OTT services and the rising consumer shift toward digital and online content are the main factors propelling the surge in the worldwide OTT traffic. According to Cisco, the global internet protocol (IP) video, multimedia, and gaming streaming traffic is predicted to account for over 81% of all internet traffic by 2021. Due to these factors, the demand for edge data centers is soaring sharply all over the world.

This is subsequently fueling the expansion of the global edge data center market. According to the estimates of P&S Intelligence, a market research company based in India, the value of the market will rise from $5.3 billion in 2019 to $53.1 billion by 2030. Furthermore, the market is predicted to advance at a CAGR of 25.4% between 2020 and 2030. Between edge data center solutions and services, the demand for the former is predicted to surge in the coming years.

Out of cooling, IT racks and enclosure, power and uninterruptible power supply (UPS), networking equipment, data center infrastructure management (DCIM), and storage, the demand for cooling solutions is predicted to soar in the future years. This will be because of the increasing adoption of various cooling technologies by edge data centers for maintaining the optimal temperature in the data center facilities. Both large enterprises and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are major end users of edge data centers.

Between these, the requirement for edge data centers was found to be higher among large enterprises in the years gone by, because of the huge investments made by various large enterprises on data centers and the generation of large volumes of unstructured data by these organizations. Geographically, the demand for edge data centers will shoot up in Asia-Pacific (APAC) in the forthcoming years. This will be because of the increasing digitization and the surging internet penetration in the regional countries.

Hence, it is safe to say that the demand for edge data centers will skyrocket all over the world in the coming years, primarily because of the growing penetration of the internet, the mushrooming usage of smartphones, and the soaring OTT traffic around the world.