ST Telemedia to build first Thailand data centre with joint venture partner
Singapore’s ST Telemedia Global Data Centres has unveiled plans to build a 75,000 square metre data centre in central Bangkok through a joint venture partnership with Thai industrial platform provider, TICON.
19 December 2018
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has announced plans to build its first facility in Thailand through a joint venture with local industrial platform provider, TICON Industrial Connection.
Sitting on a site that spans 75,000 square metres, the data centre will be located in central Bangkok and be majority owned by the Thai company, while STT GDC will hold a 49 percent share, according to a joint statement released Wednesday. Construction is slated to begin in mid-2019 and to complete by 2020.
New pilots including a drowning detection system are in the works, as the government continues to push its smart nation goal alongside an open, API-driven framework. But it stresses the importance of security in rolling out new services and acknowledges the country needs to do better, particularly, following the SingHealth data breach.
The site also marked STT GDC’s entry into the Thai data centre market, a move it said would boost the Singapore company’s global network footprint.
In addition, the new facility would support the local government’s National Digital Economy Masterplan and Thailand 4.0 initiative to transform the country into a digital economy. Such efforts would lead to the digital economy contributing up to 25 percent of Thailand’s GDP by 2027, according to projections from the Thailand Board of Investment.
New data centres also would be needed to support the region’s increasing spend on public cloud services, the two partners said. Pointing to figures from IDC, they noted that Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, was expected to see its public cloud expenditure climb at a compound annual growth rate of 32.58 percent from 2016 to 2021. This increase would be fuelled by digital transformation efforts, which in turn would drive demand for digital infrastructure and data centre capacity in the region, including Thailand.
TICON’s executives said the company’s partnership with STT GDC would help widen its portfolio to include digital and technology services, after 28 years of developing industrial properties.
The Thai organisation’s executive committee chairman Panote Sirivadhanabhakdi said: “We believe in the market potential of expanding our focus into developing Thailand’s digital economy and transforming urban living with smart cities. Developing digital infrastructure in the form of state-of-the-art data centres is one of the key investment areas we are embarking on in this new economy.”
STT GDC last week said it was building its seventh and largest data centre in Singapore, as it looked to meet growing demand for cloud computing services in the region. With construction slated to begin early-2019, the five-storey facility would have a gloss floor area of more than 27,000 square metres and was expected to completed by mid-2020.
Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/st-telemedia-to-build-first-thailand-data-centre-with-jv-partner/
