Full definition
A datacenter proxy is an IP address that lives in a server farm rather than a residential ISP. They're fast (sub-100ms latency) and cheap ($0.50–$2.50 per GB), but anti-bot systems maintain comprehensive lists of datacenter IP ranges and can block them on sight.
Use cases that work well with datacenter proxies: sites with weak anti-bot detection, internal monitoring, basic scraping of public APIs, SEO tools that don't need clean residential IPs. Use cases that don't: anything fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX, or major retailers like Nike, Walmart, Target.
Most major proxy providers offer datacenter proxies as their entry-level tier. Bright Data, Oxylabs, Rayobyte and Smartproxy are all common picks. Datacenter pools are typically tens of thousands of IPs — much smaller than residential, but rotated less aggressively because the IPs are owned outright rather than borrowed.