[SalesForce] What will happen with the Salesforce Pod identifier when there are more than 62 instances

Currently the pod instance that a record is created on is encoded in the 4 character of the ID, immediately after the key prefix. There are some more details about the Pod identifier in the question What are Salesforce ID's composed of?

As per Has Salesforce hit an architectural limit?, there are currently 61 pods listed on trust.salesforce.com.

What happens when the 62 possible values allowed by base-62 encoding is exceeded?

Will it move to the fifth character as well?

Best Answer

And the answer comes from Steven Tamm himself:

"@radnip We've used 2chars for server id for a while now. This documentation is out of date" Source

well that clears that up :)

The documentation you point to is incorrect. We're updating it.

Characters 5 & 6 were reserved as '0' from the beginning. A few years ago we started using the 5th character to represent originating instances. For example, instance cs33 uses "35" as the serverId for the ids it generates, and na41 uses "27". As data can move between instances pretty easily, the InstanceId is only helpful in determining where a record was generated, not where it is now.

Steven Tamm
Source