Reshal Seetahal, BCX

And then there were five. With the entrance of Alibaba into the South African market, all five of the world’s leading hyperscalers now have a presence in the country. It joins Microsoft, which got an early start in March 2019, which was also the year of Huawei’s entrance, and was followed by Amazon in April 2020. Google announced in October 2022 that it would be opening a local region.

The label hyperscale is reserved for the very largest of the cloud service providers. All these companies use distributed infrastructure to process data, and scale as more demands are exacted from the system. In the past, only large enterprises with a global footprint needed this kind of model, but now, it’s used by companies of all sizes.