A hyperscaler is a company that provides cloud services on a massive scale — offering IT infrastructure such as computing power, storage, and networking that is flexible, highly available, and globally scalable. Common examples of hyperscalers include:
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Alibaba Cloud
IBM Cloud (on a somewhat smaller scale)
Massive scalability
They can scale their services virtually without limits, depending on the customer's needs.
Global infrastructure
Their data centers are distributed worldwide, enabling high availability, low latency, and redundancy.
Automation & standardization
Many operations are automated (e.g., provisioning, monitoring, billing), making services more efficient and cost-effective.
Self-service & pay-as-you-go
Customers usually access services via web portals or APIs and pay only for what they actually use.
Innovation platform
Hyperscalers offer not only infrastructure (IaaS), but also platform services (PaaS), as well as tools for AI, big data, or IoT.
Hosting websites or web applications
Data storage (e.g., backups, archives)
Big data analytics
Machine learning / AI
Streaming services
Corporate IT infrastructure