Jabez Tan on Princeton Digital Group’s Entry into Tokyo Data Centre Market

• June 30, 2021

Source: The Business Times (Singapore)

Singapore-based Princeton Digital invests US$1b to build 97MW data centre campus in Japan

SINGAPORE-BASED data centre provider Princeton Digital Group (PDG) on Tuesday announced that it is investing US$1 billion to build a 97 megawatt (MW) data centre campus in Japan, marking its entry into the market.

Located at Saitama City in the north of central Tokyo, the campus will consist of two facilities with a critical IT capacity of 48.5 MW each. Overall, the campus will occupy a land area of 33,047 square metres, and is designed to serve leading hyperscalers in Japan, said PDG in a press statement.

It has already secured the land and power, and construction will begin later this year.

Rangu Salgame, chairman and chief executive of PDG, said: “The Asia-Pacific region is set to be the largest data centre market in the world, and this announcement underscores our vision to be the market leader in this region.

“Our entry into Japan and, in particular, Tokyo, demonstrates our continued ability to enter new markets that matter to our customers.”

The move comes just three months after PDG had announced its foray into India. In March, PDG said that it will be building a data centre campus in the Mumbai region, which will have 48 MW of critical IT capacity across two buildings. The campus is expected to be ready in 2022.

Additionally, the data centre provider in April announced that it has secured US$230 million debt refinancing from China Merchants Bank, as part of its US$1 billion expansion plan in China.

PDG was formed in 2017 via the partnership of former Tata Communications executives Mr Salgame and Varoon Raghavan, along with Warburg Pincus. It also has a presence in Singapore, Indonesia, and China.

Based on data from Structure Research, Greater Tokyo’s hyperscale co-location market is expected to reach US$1.6 billion by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 25.1 per cent between 2021 and 2025.

Jabez Tan, head of research at Structure Research, said the Greater Tokyo market “is projected to see accelerated demand from hyperscale data centre deployments moving forward, from what we believe is a convergence of several critical factors”.

These include Japan’s “sizeable addressable market as the third-largest country in the world by gross domestic product, the absence of a domestic hyperscale cloud platform that presents an ideal competitive landscape between both US and Chinese hyperscale cloud providers, as well as being a key connectivity aggregation and distribution hub for submarine cables landing from the US West Coast to access the rest of the Asia-Pacific region”, he added.