APAC, Jakarta, hyperscale, JVs, WordPress
It was a bit of a slower week in the US and Canada with national holidays in both countries. Not surprisingly, activity in other regions was busier and a number of notable developments this past week came out of the APAC region.
The big four APAC markets (excluding China/India) – Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo/Osaka and Sydney/Melbourne – have been leading the way for some time. But other markets in the region are coming and it is looking more and more like Jakarta could be one of the next big markets, particularly in southeast Asia. Market validation is typically driven by hyperscale cloud presence and AWS is set to build its first AZ in the region. We have some details that have recently emerged. Meanwhile, NTT is expanding in Jakarta as well (not too far from AWS) as it looks to support both retail and hyperscale clients.
On the strategic side, APAC-based funds continue to push into the digital infrastructure world. Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC formed a JV with Equinix to serve the FLAP markets in UK/Europe, while Lendlease partnered with an institutional investor to invest in data centres further across APAC. Digital infrastructure continues to be a rising asset class.
The cloud and hosting side was somewhat quiet, but we saw more activity in the WordPress market. We have some more data points on Flywheel, which was acquired by WP Engine, and Pantheon is expanding its reach by taking advantage of its asset-light model built on hyperscale.
Recently, there has been a lot of activity around Toronto and Montreal. The past week saw eStruxture increase its resources to push its expansion efforts.
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