Public cloud providers are quickly becoming the biggest buyers of data center infrastructure equipment, as purchasing of hardware and software both rebounded sharply in 2021, according to a recent report by Synergy Research Group.
Overall spending grew by roughly 10% in year-on-year terms, reaching a total of $185 billion in 2021. The lion’s share of that spending was on hardware, according to Synergy, with 77% of the total spend going towards servers, storage and networking gear. Software, including operating systems, cloud management, virtualization and network security, made up the rest of the total.
