The Globe Group and Singapore’s ST Telemedia are building a 124-megawatt data center in Quezon City costing $1 billion seen partially operational by 2025.
In groundbreaking ceremonies in Fairview, Quezon City, Carlo Manala, chief executive at ST Telemedia Global Data Centers Philippines (STT GDC Philippines), said the project dwarfs anything in the country at the moment as the so-called aggregate IT load of existing data centers is only 60 megawatts.
Bruno Lopez, deputy CEO at ST Telemedia in Singapore, said the project will bridge the gap in digital data housing infrastructure in the Philippines where the availability of data centers is scarce.
Locating the data center in the Philippines also recognized the country’s strategic location in southeast Asia, making the country preferable over others in the region.
“All that data has to be somewhere,” Bruno said of the strategic importance of the joint venture members Globe, Ayala Corporation and ST Telemedia.
Lopez and Manala acknowledged that building the facility in Quezon City also recognizes that neither Hongkong nor Singapore fit the requirements of the data center given the political tensions in the former and the electricity as well as real estate limitations of the other.
Bruno cited an Oxford Economics study which found that a 20-megawatt data center delivers an output boost of $5 billion to the economy of its host, which means a significant upside for the Philippines looking to grow by 6 percent this year in terms of the gross domestic product.
For perspective, Bruno pointed out that such giants as Microsoft, Amazon and Google require data centers with IT loads ranging from 20 gigawatts to 25 gigawatts, making the prospective IT load of the joint venture of only 124 megawatts a tiny drop in the bucket.
As the facility will be built in phases, the initial capacity of the data center when it opens for business in 2025 is seen at only 28 megawatts. The full IT load potential could be hit in subsequent years.
The new STT Fairview data center campus extends over 83,000 square meters of gross floor area across four buildings and will cater to both hyperscalers and enterprises, providing flexible and scalable low latency colocation options that are also sustainably built and operated.
“With the Philippines’ digital transformation gaining headway, STT GDC’s new facility will be an important addition in the data center space in the country, where the market is underserved,” Ernest Cu, Globe Group president and chief executive ,said.
“This will provide crucial support for the growing digital industry not just in the country but also in the region, and will set a new standard of sustainability-driven data centers in the Philippines,” he added.
With the Philippine digital industry set to grow at a projected compounded annual growth rate of 20 percent through 2030, Carlo Malana also project a “rapidly growing demand for high-quality colocation services in the Philippines as both cloud service providers and enterprises alike continually expand their business platforms to meet consumers’ evolving demand for low-latency digital services.”
Lionel Yeo, chief executive of Southeast Asia, ST Telemedia Global Data Centers said the Philippine data center colocation market is poised for growth with a five-year compound average growth rate of 25 percent through 2027 and hyperscale demand is on the uptrend.
“This is an opportune moment to support the Philippines’ digital growth agenda with core data center infrastructure that is the linchpin of a digital society,” he added.
STT GDC Philippines already operates five data centers with a total IT capacity of 22MW, with more than 95 percent of its power coming from renewable energy sources.
