The field of data is an interesting illustration of the way in which some driving forces of the world economy are interacting. Data will always keep on growing, because there are always new things to be measured and new ways of measuring. The scope and frequency of measurement continues to increase. Hardware advances allow for further improvements in data collection, and software advances encourage analysis and new secondary data. The Chinese company Tencent has become the first Chinese company to have over a million servers. Akamai has more than 240,000 servers in over 130 countries.
Hardware advances and server advances are part of the picture. So are the growth in data and the development of software that needs more and more data (data analysis, AI). But there’s a third factor: regulation in its broadest sense. It includes trade agreements (insofar as they cover data and telecommunications) as well as specific regulations on data within a country or region. The best known example of the latter is the EUI’s GDPR, which is often responsible for those irritating website notices about cookies. However GDPR has had important effects also on investment patterns: service providers are locating servers within the EU so that EU customers and others can have the additional security that GDPR provides.