hyperscaler

This is a company that provides massive computing hardware and software on a needs basis to other companies and organisations, allowing them to scale their computing resources up and down as demand ebbs and flows without themselves acquiring the huge physical data centres required to cope with the load.  Amazon, Microsoft and Google all provide hyperscale computing.

The term emerged in the late 1990s when the first massive computer centres were envisaged.  Google launched its first hyperscale data centre in  2006.  These centres were considered not to be in the normal realm of data centres — they were outside the normal scale and thus hyper. Initially applied to the physical hardware, hyperscale then was applied to the software.  And finally hyperscaler has become the term for a company that has built these massive resources.