Singapore’s Keppel Enters German Data Center Market

Singaporean Keppel DC REIT has entered the German market by acquiring a data center that is currently under construction near Frankfurt from mainCubes One Immobilien for €84 million ($92 million), the company announced this week. In a sale-leaseback transaction, mainCubes One, a colocation company, will lease the data center from Keppel.

Keppel DC REIT is a subsidiary of the Singaporean marine, property, and infrastructure giant Keppel Corp. It is the first data center real estate investment trust listed in Asia, trading on the Singapore Exchange. It was listed on the exchange in December 2014.

Scheduled to come online in 2018, the four-story data center in Offenbach will provide about 130,000 square feet of space.

The facility will be Keppel’s 10th data center. The real estate investment trust has data centers in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, UK, Ireland, and Netherlands.

Frankfurt is one of Europe’s largest data center markets. Keppel’s future facility will be in proximity to DE-CIX (Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange – the largest internet exchange in the world by peak data rate.

Keppel is the fourth-largest data center provider in the Singapore market, currently led by the local telco Singtel, Silicon Valley-based Equinix, and London-based Global Switch, according to a recent report by Structure Research.