- First centre to open in March
- AI driving up demand for facilities
- Potential $5bn market
Edgnex, the data centre subsidiary of Dubai’s Damac Group, is planning to invest $3 billion in sites across Southeast Asia over the next three to five years.
The investment is part of a $7 billion digital infrastructure strategy that aims to meet rising demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing, Danish Nayar, Damac’s senior vice-president of investments and acquisitions, told Bloomberg News.
“Today we have over 550 megawatts of projected capacity towards Southeast Asia, which effectively means that this could be a $5 billion market for us,” Nayar said. “We are on our way to increase further.”
The first of three data centres in Thailand is expected to open next March and Edgnex has already acquired land for facilities in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Most of the centres will use Nvidia’s Blackwell “superchips”.
Vietnam and the Philippines could be targeted in the future, Nayar said. Plans are due to be announced in 2025.
Although Damac’s core business is Dubai real estate, it already operates two data centres in Riyadh and Dammam and has invested in similar projects in Spain and Greece.
Demand for data centres is soaring worldwide and the tech giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft are spending billions of dollars to develop high-tech infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
- Aldar acquires unfinished commercial tower in DIFC
- Opinion: Time to give some of that fintech funding to R&D
- Apple, HP and Dell lose market share in Gulf
The UAE, which hosts the Middle East’s largest concentration of data centres, still faces a capacity crunch because of the demand from AI and cloud-based technologies. UAE data centre vacancy stood at just 9 percent in Q3 2023, the real estate consultancy Knight Frank said.
Saudi Arabia is also scaling up its data centre investments. The Public Investment Fund is working with DigitalBridge to expand infrastructure across the GCC, while Microsoft plans to develop a cloud data centre in the country.
Data centre capacity is forecast to more than double by 2025 in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, research by the American commercial real estate company CBRE found.