Accelerated Growth of Digital Services Driving Hyperscale Operators to New Highs

RENO, NV, April 10, 2025

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the total revenue of hyperscale companies grew by just over 10% in 2024, reaching $2.65 trillion. This compared with 8% growth in 2023. More notably, while their revenues from non-digital products and services grew by just 1% in 2024, their revenues from digital services grew by 13%. Their 2024 service growth was led by cloud computing, social networking and SaaS, up 23%, 20% and 18% respectively. Within the cloud segment, generative AI platform services and GPUaaS both more than doubled in size in 2024, with AI technology also helping to fuel growth across a broad range of digital services. In terms of total company revenues, the biggest hyperscale companies are Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, JD.com, ByteDance and Alibaba. Those with the highest 2024 growth rates were CoreWeave, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The research is based on analysis and tracking data that Synergy has developed covering 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. These companies now dominate the world’s IT landscape, accounting for the bulk of IT services, spending on IT hardware, and data center capacity. Together they now have 1,149 hyperscale data centers in operation around the world.

“Some question the logic behind hyperscale companies jacking up their capex numbers recently, and again planning to increase investments substantially in 2025. Once you understand the scale and growth of the digital services that the capex is supporting, the logic becomes much clearer,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “They operate in capital intensive infrastructure markets, where huge ongoing investments are essential in order to be leading players. Despite this, in aggregate their capex to revenue ratio was historically running at well under 10%. 2024 saw this metric surge for some of the companies, but in aggregate it was still barely over 12%. Their digital service revenues will continue to grow at strong double digit rates over the next five years, enabling them to continue funding necessary capex budgets.”