451 Research released projections that the global colocation and wholesale market will exceed $54 billion in revenue by 2023, according to its Datacenter KnowledgeBase (DCKB) – which now tracks more than 6,100 facilities and 1,535 datacenter providers worldwide. Whilst is clear that ‘hyperscale cloud’ demand is continuing to drive strong growth for ‘outsourced capacity’, the opportunity to capitalize on housing the growth of distributed workloads at the edge of a network is less clearly demonstrable as we await to see how the launch of 5G will shape demand for edge compute.

We speak with four senior executives of prominent colocation entities to discuss the size of deployment which is likely to help them supersede growth projections and the core investments they are likely to make in the next year or two to gain a large proportion of both market opportunities.