New research by TeleGeography has revealed that Tokyo remains the largest retail colocation market in the world, with Hong Kong and Washington in second place.

According to the research, Tokyo has provided 13.8 million square feet of gross retail capacity in 2021, with Hong Kong and Washington each providing a 50% smaller data centre footprint than Tokyo.

“Long-term colocation growth across markets tends to be modest in both large and smaller markets. Between 2017 and 2021, the median CAGR among a sampling of 109 markets was just 6%,” said Jon Hjembo, Senior Manager at TeleGeography.

“Major hubs outpacing the median growth rate include Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Washington, each with at least 10% compound annual growth in retail capacity.”

Mumbai, Seoul, Montreal, Madrid, and Johannesburg were also revealed to be notable markets, with at least 1 million square feet of retail colocation space that have each seen rapid growth of between 18% and 35% CAGR for gross capacity over the last five years.

“We’ve also observed a recent inflection point in the data center and broader interconnection market,” added Hjembo.

“While traditional hub markets have seen continual growth, numerous secondary markets and metropolitan nodes on the frontier of network development have seen tremendous new investment by both local and international operators. This has involved a mix of network, data centre, cloud, and internet exchange operators, working together to build new and more widely distributed hubs.”

TeleGeography’s Data Center Research Service can be downloaded here.