The main reasons behind the soaring OTT traffic are the increasing consumer preference for online content and the growing requirement for OTT services in several countries. According to Cisco, “the global internet protocol (IP) video, gaming and multimedia streaming traffic is estimated to reach more than 81% of all internet traffic by 2021, from 75% in 2019”.

The other important factor fueling the requirement for edge data centers is the rapid commercialization of 5G in many countries around the world. With the growing popularity of 5G networks, the generation of data would increase, which would, in turn, push up the requirement for the edge data centers. Because of these reasons, the valuation of the global edge data center market is expected to rise from $5.3 billion to $53.1 billion from 2019 to 2030. Furthermore, the market is expected to advance at a CAGR of 25.4% between 2020 and 2030.

Between the large and small and medium enterprises, which are the two main types of organizations requiring edge data centers, the utilization of these facilities has historically been higher by the large enterprises. This is ascribed to the huge investments that were made by these organizations in the development of data centers in the past, on account of the large volumes of data generated by them.

For example, Microsoft Corporation announced in May 2020 that it intends to invest $1.0 billion for building data centers in Poland for supporting the network of government, entrepreneurs, and enterprises in the country. Globally, the North American edge data center market is currently being observed to be the most prosperous, as per the findings of P&S Intelligence, a market research firm based in India.

This is attributed to the commercialization of 5G and the increasing investments being made by the governments of North American countries for developing data centers in the region. Moreover, the increasing data traffic is massively pushing up the requirement for edge data centers in the region. Hence, due to the increasing generation of data and the rising popularity of online content and video streaming services, the demand for edge data centers will increase considerably throughout the world in the coming years.