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Hyperscaler

Its 7 cross-references, woven across the glossary's 18 categories

Operator of very large-scale data centers, typically a major cloud provider running massive compute capacity.

Definition

A hyperscaler runs data centers at very large scale, deploying compute and storage in massive, standardized volumes. The term mainly designates the major public cloud providers that run dozens of sites totaling several gigawatts of installed power. Their model rests on extreme optimization of energy efficiency, automation and infrastructure pooling. For the insurance market, hyperscalers concentrate considerable accumulation risk: a growing share of the digital economy depends on a few operators, so a major outage at one provider can trigger simultaneous business interruptions across a multitude of insureds in varied lines. This concentration recreates, at the scale of cloud infrastructure, the accumulation and monoculture problem already identified for critical software and systems.

Example

Hypothetical case: a prolonged regional outage at a major cloud provider can simultaneously interrupt thousands of client companies, turning a technical incident into an accumulation loss for insurers.

Related terms
Also known as

hyperscaler, hyperscale cloud provider, hyperscale

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