Frasers links with partner on data centre
INTEGRATED real estate platform Frasers Property (Thailand) Plc (FPT) and Singapore-based data centre service provider ST Telemedia Global Data Centres plan to spend more than Bt7 billion to establish a hyperscale data centre under a joint venture that seeks to ride on the growth in Thailand’s digital economy.
The development will have two data centre buildings built to global standards and the first building has been designed with almost 30,000 square metres of gross floor area. The investment for the first phase of the hyperscale data centre project will be more than Bt7 billion and construction of this phase is expected to be completed in 2021. The project will be in the Ramkhamhaeng district in central Bangkok, FPT’s president Sopon Racharaksa said yesterday.
He said that in recent years, many large corporations and medium-sized organisations have embraced digital transformation in their business operations, giving rise to demand for colocation data centres that are highly secure, agile and reliable.
The company is confident that the joint venture between FPT and STT GDC will help contribute to Thailand's digital economy. This collaboration will broaden FPT's ability to offer comprehensive services from industrial buildings to data centre services to its customers, Sopon said.
According to the company’s reports, the prospects for Thailand’s digital economy are positive. IT-related spending is estimated at US$72 billion from 2019 to 2022.
“Therefore, there is an increasing need for data centre colocation,” Sopon. “Business entrepreneurs today are looking for facilities that are highly secured, flexible and energy efficient resulting in growth in demand for data centres and cloud computing in line with the global trends.”
The digital economy is expected to bring robust growth and contribute up to a quarter of Thailand's GDP by 2027, while the total data centre market in Asean has been forecast to grow from US$1.9 billion in 2017 to US$5.4 billion in 2024 at a compound annual growth rate of 16.1 per cent.
ST GDC’s group chief executive officer Bruno Lopez said: “Combining its world-class data centre development capabilities with FPT's long-standing real estate experience in the Thai market, the joint venture's first data centre in Ramkhamhaeng will be a state-of-the art development, incorporating some of the latest data centre technologies and sustainable design features to ensure optimal energy efficiency.
We are already seeing positive interest from global cloud service providers and enterprises who are looking to leverage the growth in the digital economy.”