Chinese data centre operator GDS sees Singapore as hub for its Southeast Asia expansion plans
- Last year, GDS acquired 10,000 square metres of land in Batam, an Indonesian city about 25km from Singapore, where it will construct two new data centre buildings
- Southeast Asia’s internet economy is projected to be valued at US$1 trillion in 2030, according to a report by Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain & Company
Data centre management company GDS is following in the footsteps of its Chinese tech customers by expanding operations to Southeast Asia, while betting on Singapore as a regional data hub, according to its chairman and CEO.
Founded in 2001, the Nasdaq and Hong Kong-listed GDS is a third-party data centre operator serving clients such as Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, and US cloud giant Amazon Web Services.
Although GDS’s major facilities are in China, the company has started to develop data centres overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, to serve the increasing number of Chinese technology companies operating there, founder, chairman and CEO William Huang said in an interview with the South China Morning Post this week.
“Singapore has been a [major] hub due to its unique location, and that naturally determines the city’s important role in the future data centre industry,” Huang said. “It will be the base to expand our services and cover the Southeast Asian region.”
“Now is the right time to map out a plan in Southeast Asia,” Huang said, adding that the impetus for the move was to follow customers who expand in the region and need “digital warehouses” to store data.
Data centres, climate-controlled buildings that house routers and servers, provide the critical digital infrastructure for cloud computing, video streaming, and e-commerce. Southeast Asia, with its booming internet industry and heavy presence of Chinese tech giants, has become an investment hotbed for China’s digital infrastructure providers.
Last year, GDS launched several large-scale data centre projects in the region. Last November, the company said it acquired 10,000 square metres of land in Batam, an Indonesian city about 25km from Singapore, where it plans to construct two new data centre buildings with a total power capacity of 28MW.
In April this year, the company announced another partnership with Malaysian power producer YTL Power International Berhad, with plans to co-develop 168MW of data centre capacity for eight facilities in Johor Bahru, a city near the causeway linking the Malay Peninsula with Singapore.