Grand Ming Tops Out 15-Story Data Center Tower in Hong Kong

Grand Ming Group has finished construction of a 15-story data center tower in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong. This is the second high rise the Hong Kong construction company has converted into a data center.

The Asia Pacific region has some of the world’s fastest growing data center markets, and Hong Kong is one of them. Lots of companies that use data center services are located in places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, but these business centers also serve as data center hubs that serve customers in other parts of the region.

Some of the most recent players to establish data center presence in Hong Kong include IBM SoftLayer, which launched there in April, AliCloud, the cloud services arm of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, which announced a Hong Kong data center in May, and LeaseWeb, which took space at a Pacnet facility in Hong Kong in December.

All three are Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, which is telling about the nature of demand in Hong Kong and the broader Asia Pacific region.

Grand Ming’s new Hong Kong data center, called iTech Tower 2, has about 100,000 square feet of space total and can support up to 1,400 server racks. At full utilization, it will provide 6 megawatts of critical power.

The company estimates its development costs to be about $88 million.

In a statement, Grand Ming Chairman Chan Hung Ming thanked a data center facilitation unit in the government CIO’s office for help in getting proper approvals for the project. “The process in getting through all governmental approval is not simple because of such unprecedented case in using high-tier data center use on an industrial land development,” he said.

Grand Ming finished the first chunk of data center space in its first data center building, called iTech Tower 1, in 2008. The 10-story building is located about two miles away from iTech Tower 2, in Tsuen Wan.