April 13, 2023

Good morning, this is Cold Isle Insights.
Data centers are where IT, telecom, and infrastructure converge. That’s our focus.

Here’s what’s inside:

• South East Asia: Deep dive into an exploding region

• Resources: Here’s what you should be looking at this week

• Daily Dall-E 🎨 

Est. read time: 5mins, 1secs

Southeast Asia: A deep dive into a dynamic digital region

It was announced last week that Oracle is launching a second cloud region in Singapore to match the “tremendous upsurge in demand” for its cloud services in the region.
We investigated this growth and found dozens of growth projections for the sector, ranging from 21%/yr by IDC, 13.15% by Equinix, and 18.97% by Statista, among many more.
Instead of projecting growth, we’re looking into the 5 key markets of the subcontinent, and what’s happened recently, and what that may spell for the future.

Singapore

Jay Parikh, engineering executive at Meta says, “Singapore is one of the most vibrant and modern technology hubs in all of Asia.” Last year, led by global telecoms leader Singtel, Singapore became the only country in the world to be fully covered by 5G. The success of the 5g rollout, along with the Oracle expansion and an $86 million expansion of Equinix’s already-new SG5 data center has cemented Singapore as the digital leader in Southeast Asia.
These latest digital developments come on the heels of a $1 billion Meta data center that broke ground in 2019.

With the three-year data center moratorium being lifted late last year, other companies developing data solutions in Singapore include:

• Princeton Digital: $1 billion data center announced 2/23

• BDx: Relocating its headquarters to Singapore

• Chinese Giant Tencent: Announced plans in 2/23 to expand in Singapore

There’s a reason Cushman and Wakefield ranked Singapore #3 globally in its 2023 Data Center Market Comparison Report, and the digital powerhouse shows no sign of slowing down

Indonesia

The “Making Indonesia 4.0” initiative was launched in April 2018 and is the island country’s concerted roadmap to becoming a leader in the 4th (read: digital) industrial revolution.
Indonesia’s digital economy is the largest in Southeast Asia, and the last few years have seen most major cloud providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba) move into the market.

The latest entrant is Singapore’s telecoms giant Singtel. The third international expansion for Singtel, through a partnership announced in December with two of Indonesia’s largest telecom providers, this will be Singtel’s first data center in Indonesia.

A couple more notable developments:

• NTT: New Jakarta 3 data center launching at 15.2MW, eventually to 45MW

• Cloud growth: cloud computing has grown at least 48%/yr for five straight years!

• EdgeConnex, BDx, Equinix, ByteDance have all announced expansion into Indonesia

It’s not just the size of the market that has attracted so much growth. Indonesia also has a very young population, so adoption of technology has been easier than in other asian markets. There are also fewer regulatory restrictions than in competitive countries like Singapore.

Malaysia

Last month AWS became the latest hyperscale cloud provider to enter Malaysia. Joining Microsoft Azure and Google, Amazon’s move marks the largest international technology investment in Malaysia to date. Along with the announcement, AWS also stated they plan to invest a further $6.7 billion in Malaysia over the next 15 years.

A considerable challenge for Malaysia as it tries to digitize has been its slow telecom growth. Part of this is because Malaysia is already a mature telecoms market, but at a projected 3%/yr over the next 5 years, sluggish telecom expansion could hamper some of its potential growth.

However, with big data center companies like Vantage, NTT, DigitalInfra, AIMS and countless other major providers, significant investment has already been made in the market.

Thailand

There are currently only 32 operational colocation data centers operational in Thailand. Most of these are designed according to Tier III standards. So while Thailand is a smaller economy than others in the region, it’s not that much smaller - there is still a lot of room for growth.

While we certainly don’t endorse any projections of future growth, the consensus of many industry experts is that the Thai data center market will close-to double over the next five years.

The entrance of Data Bridge, Telehouse, NTT, STT, Nautilus, OneAsia Network, EdgeCentres and others over the past 3 years has injected more confidence into the Thai market.

Vietnam

Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, HP Enterprise, Huawei, Hitachi Vantara, and IBM. Those are all major enterprise vendors that are operating or investing in the Vietnamese data sector.

Vietnam is one of the more exciting, attractive young colocation markets in Southeast Asia. In fact, Research and Markets has Vietnam in the top 10 worldwide for emerging data center markets. W.Media cites “The National Digital Transformation Program” that the Vietnamese Government launches several years ago as to one reason the country’s IT infrastructure is growing at the fastest pace in the region.

Resources and Recs

Daily Dall-E 🎨

In honor of the NBA playoffs. That basket looks a little high…

I hope you learned something. We would love your feedback, and love it even more if you shared this with a friend or coworker!
- Taylor