New Singapore Data Center Equinix’s Largest in Asia

Equinix has brought online its third data center in Singapore – the company’s largest to date in the Asia Pacific region.

European telecommunications giant Orange and U.S. cloud and hosting service provider Datapipe became the data center’s first two tenants, according to Equinix, a Redwood City, California-based colocation provider.

It is one of the five data centers Equinix said it would open as part of a global expansion program, announced earlier this month. The other locations are New York, Toronto, London, and Australia.

Singapore is one of the fastest-growing Asia data center markets. But data center demand is booming across all Asian business centers as foreign companies expand infrastructure to serve local customers, and as local companies grow together with the market.

Singapore is the network connectivity and business hub for Southeast Asia one of the key hubs for the region at large.

This is the third Singapore data center announcement this week. Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink announced Tuesday the launch of a cloud data center there – its first cloud location in Asia. Local company Singapore Technologies Telemedia announced plans to build a 150,000-square-foot data center.

The new Equinix data center is 385,000 square feet total and can accommodate about 5,000 IT cabinets at full build-out. The first phase that was recently launched has enough space for 1,000 racks.

The company invested $53 million in building out and launching the first phase, bringing its total investment in Singapore data centers to more than $300 million.

Demand on the island comes from a variety of industry verticals, including financial services, network operators, and cloud service providers, according to Equinix.

Jim Poole, a vice president at Equinix, said in an earlier interview with Data Center Knowledge that Singapore was second only to Ashburn, Virginia, in the level of network connectivity.

The new data center will eventually be connected to another Equinix data center on the island with a dedicated fiber link, which will enable customers in one facility to easily extend their infrastructure to the other. Direct access to an already established data center, which according to the provider has a bustling ecosystem of businesses, makes the new facility more valuable.

Creating interconnection hubs for a wide variety of players in the market inside its data centers has always been a big part of Equinix’s business model.