IDC's Worldwide Datacenter Facilities and Services Taxonomy, 2026

This IDC study updates IDC's definitions for assessing the scope and scale of datacenter facilities buildouts, operator types, and critical infrastructure components, excluding IT equipment deployed within datacenters. As with all taxonomy documents, this taxonomy will be continually revised and edited to ensure its applicability to market offerings."This updated IDC datacenter taxonomy provides the definitions and segmentations used by IDC analysts to track the global datacenter facilities and operations footprint," explains Andrew Buss, senior research director, Digital and Datacenter Infrastructure and Services at IDC. "The document serves as a guideline for users to better understand IDC's datacenter research and provides a standardized framework for defining metrics used within the Semi-Annual Datacenter Facilities Tracker and other IDC datacenter facilities research."