By David Daoud: The rise of hyperscale data centers has redrawn the boundaries of the ITAD industry. For companies in the business of decommissioning, reselling, and recycling retired IT hardware, the most important clients are no longer Fortune 1000 banks, healthcare institutions or retailers—they’re the tech giants running the cloud. This report looks at how the so-called “Magnificent Seven”—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, and Tesla—are managing their internal decommissioning needs and what that means for third-party ITAD providers trying to stay in the game.
The ITAD industry, representing companies that offer IT asset disposition service as a core business, is finding it challenging to penetrate the hyperscaler market. Hyperscalers are internalizing their most valuable ITAD functions. The traditional “we’ll pick it up and wipe it” model is not enough.
But this doesn’t mean the savvy ITADs cannot find an opportunity inside the hyperscaler fortress. The hyperscaler model creates new demand for specialized services—things like on-site compliance destruction specifically catered to large hyperscalers, regional logistics, part-level diagnostics, and carbon accounting. The real win isn’t in volume anymore. It’s in precision.
The smart ITAD firms won’t chase old enterprise accounts—they’ll figure out how to quietly plug into the workflows of Microsoft, AWS, and Google. They’ll focus on specific regions, specific components, or specific compliance frameworks. And they’ll offer value where the hyperscalers hit friction. Essentially shifting to a consulting model. This is just the natural evolution into the next version of ITAD. And for those who move early, there’s plenty of business left on the table.
In this report, both written and in video, we unpack how each of the Magnificent Seven is building, operating, and retiring massive infrastructure at a scale never seen before. We explore what’s happening inside their data centers, what kind of gear they’re cycling through, and how they’re handling disposition—quietly, aggressively, and often without external help. More importantly, we show where third-party ITAD firms can still wedge themselves into this ecosystem—not by chasing volume, but by solving the edge cases these giants can’t or won’t manage on their own.
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