Edge data center

An edge data center is a smaller facility located close to end users or devices to minimize latency and backhaul costs. Typical locations are secondary cities, network aggregation points, and cell-tower sites. Edge facilities typically range from tens of kW to a few MW, versus tens of MW for regional hyperscale sites, and target round-trip latencies under 5-10 ms to nearby users. Use cases include content delivery, 5G network functions, gaming, industrial IoT, real-time video analytics, and AI inference serving. Edge sites are often unmanned, remotely monitored, and built from modular or containerized designs. The edge complements rather than replaces core data centers: latency-sensitive processing happens locally while training, storage, and batch workloads remain centralized.