Princeton plans $1bn for Data Centres

Princeton Digital Group, a Singapore-based company, is planning to spend $1 billion to construct new data centres in Batam, Indonesia, to meet the growing demand for the infrastructure powering Southeast Asia’s fast-growing digital economy. The new campus will have a 96-megawatt facility and will enable Princeton Digital’s customers to expand their infrastructure as investment in the region grows. The company has secured power for the facility, which will support its operations in Singapore.

The CEO of Princeton Digital Group, Rangu Salgame, stated that Singapore will continue to play a major role in Asia’s internet as a digital hub. He also said that a billion dollars is the minimum that the company would be looking to spend, considering the rising demand in Singapore in the next three to four years. Furthermore, the company is expanding outside the region; in December 2022, it announced that it was opening its first data centre in India with a $300 million investment.

Southeast Asia’s digital economy is expected to reach $330 billion by 2025, according to a report published by Google, Bain & Company, and Temasek Holdings. Tech giants such as Amazon’s AWS, Google, and Microsoft are facing increasing competition in the region as Chinese companies increase their investments. In September 2022, Alibaba Cloud announced that it would spend $1 billion to support global partners over the next three years, and in November 2022, Huawei Technologies revealed that it was investing $300 million to upgrade its cloud infrastructure in Indonesia.

The increasing demand for cloud infrastructure and services in the region is being driven by the rapid adoption of mobile and online services by Southeast Asia’s consumers, and data localisation requirements are also contributing to the demand for data centres. The new investment by Princeton Digital Group will boost the company’s credentials as a pan-Asian operator and allow it to meet the growing demand for data centres in the region.