Ascendas to build new data centre in India

Ascendas Property Fund of Singapore has announced a new data centre campus to be built through its subsidiary, Acsendas India Trust (a-i Trust).

The 6.6-acre data centre campus will be one of the largest in Airoli, a data centre hub near Navi Mumbai.

The company will invest $216.6 million USD in the first phase of the project, which will be launched in the second quarter of 2024. The phase one facility will have 325,000 sp ft of usable space. When completed, the data centre campus will provide 575,000 sq ft of usable space and 90 MW of power.

The data centre will meet the needs of clients looking to improve their technological capabilities, improve adoption of new technologies like 5G, IoT, and big data; as well as comply with local data storage regulations.

CEO of Ascendas India Trust Sanjeev Dasgupta, said that India’s rapidly growing digitization, large market size, and the trend of data localization regulations all validated the investment in a data centre build in India. “We look to improve our portfolio resilience through diversification into new economy asset classes such as data centres and life sciences. As we grow further, we will continue to be prudent in our capital management and nimble in seizing investment opportunities, to maximise unitholders’ returns.”

India is not the only country in the region that Ascendas is focused on. In 2017, a-i Trust’s parent company, Ascendas Property Fund of Singapore, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Chinese government to promote innovation and support startups in China. This agreement focused on using the AIRmaker accelerator to coordinate Singaporean deep learning and digital health startups to the Chinese market.

China and India are both attractive investment areas for data centre providers like Ascendas. Demand has increased due to economic, cultural and societal changes accelerated by the recent pandemic, and is expected to continue growing over the next several years due to the increasing adoption of new technologies like 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT). These factors are expected to result in an expansion of India’s total data centre capacity at a compound annual growth rate of 31% to 1,007 MW by 2023.