The total number of US data centers “of any kind” will go from 2.94m this year to 2.89m by 2016, but the total square footage of data center floor in the country will grow by nearly 100m sq ft in that time period, according to a forecast by IDC Research.

This will happen because organizations will continue shutting down more and more internal server rooms and IT closets (IDC counts those as data centers), while commercial providers of data center space or cloud-based IT infrastructure will continue building larger facilities.

Total square footage of data center space in the US will go from 611.4m sq ft in 2012 to more than 700m sq ft in 2016, IDC said in a new report on the subject.

The number of data centers in the US has been falling since the economic crisis of 2008. IDC register the first decline of 0.7% in 2009, which was triggered by the crisis.

At the same time, total data center capacity in the country grew by more than 1%.

The trend has been similar in the UK.

According to the latest report by DatacenterDynamics Intelligence, the amount of internal data center space in the UK decreased by 0.35m sq m in 2012 from a total of about 3.3m sq m in 2011. This was while the amount of commercial colocation space grew by 0.05m sq m, reaching 0.75m sq m in 2012.

IDC says the trend in the US is driven by consolidation through virtualization and a greater shift to the use of cloud-based infrastructure services. DatacenterDynamics Intelligence managing director Nicola Hayes described similar drivers behind the trend in the UK.

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