Equinix to open fourth Singapore datacentre in 2019

Equinix is opening its fourth datacentre in Singapore later this year, cementing the city-state’s growing stature as a regional datacentre powerhouse.

Slated for completion in the fourth quarter of 2019, the $85.3m SG4 facility will provide interconnection and premium datacentre services including co-location and direct links to major cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In its first phase of launch, the datacentre will offer an initial capacity of 1,400 cabinets. It will eventually accommodate more than 4,000 cabinets, with a total colocation space of more than 132,180 ft².

Equinix currently operates three other datacentres in Singapore, offering over 445,000 ft² of colocation space following the expansion of its SG3 datacentre that nearly doubled in size.

Owned by Mapletree Industrial Trust, a Singapore-listed industrial real estate investment trust, SG4 will be directly connected to Equinix’s existing local datacentres via low-latency dark fibre links.

This enables organisations to securely interconnect with some 600 companies across industries, such as financial services, cloud services, biomedical sciences, IT, communications, media, physical sciences and engineering.

Equinix said its growing investments reflect its confidence in Singapore’s future as a digital hub in Asia. Citing its own market study, it noted that the country’s interconnection bandwidth capacity – a measure of direct and private data exchange between businesses – will more than quadruple, reaching 394Tbps by 2021.

Nishchal Khorana, director of digital transformation practice at Frost & Sullivan, said Equinix’s investments in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region has enabled enterprises to deploy a distributed IT infrastructure at the edge and privately connect with the centralised IT core.

“With the expansion in Singapore, Equinix’s presence in the region is becoming even more significant as it pushes its footprint beyond regional hubs to national edge metros,” Khorana added.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, Singapore’s datacentre market was a hot favourite among investors in APAC in the 12-month period leading up to the second quarter of 2018, drawing close to 40% of the total real estate investment in datacentres across the region.

“Datacentre operators in Singapore held back on the construction of datacentres, concerned about the large datacentre stock that flooded Singapore between 2017 and 2018,” said Lynus Pook, associate director for datacentre advisory at Cushman & Wakefield Singapore.

“As result, the market is looking at a very limited stock of newly completed datacentres going into 2019. This spells good news for datacentre operators as they can backfill the space that was left vacant since the fourth quarter of 2017 when competition among datacentre operators was very intense.”

Pook added that the opportunity to fill vacant datacentre space in Singapore is narrowing swiftly as the market anticipates the next wave of supply to be ready by the second and third quarters of 2020.

“With the acceleration of digitisation, we expect datacentres to shift from the conventional 20MW to the hyperscale of 50 to 80MW datacentres to meet the needs of cloud operators in Singapore,” he said.