What Is a Hyperscaler?
2026-10-26
The term hyperscaler emerged around the turn of the 2010s and already had its modern meaning at that time: a large-scale cloud infrastructure operator serving a very large number of customers. It should be noted, however, that there is still no universally accepted definition of what qualifies a company as a hyperscaler.
Nevertheless, these operators typically have enormous data centers with installed capacities of hundreds of kilowatts, which serve as the foundation for their cloud services. In addition, a hyperscaler operates a geographically distributed network of its own or leased data centers. This enables it to build distributed architectures and offer virtually every type of cloud service.
Hyperscale data centers are characterized by a high degree of standardization and uniformity at every level—hardware, software, and services. This approach allows providers to optimize costs and ensure maximum integration of different facilities into a unified operational infrastructure.
Examples of such operators include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Meta, Google Cloud Platform, Apple, Oracle, IBM, OVHcloud, Hetzner Online, Exoscale, and others.