Technology company Princeton Digital Group (PDG) is preparing an investment of $150 million or 2.1 trillion rupiah to strengthen the data center business in Indonesia. According to the plan, PDG will build a new data center (greenfield) named Jakarta Cibitung 2 (JC2) with a capacity of 22 megawatts (MW) on an area of ​​19,550 m2 in the same location.

PDG is a data center provider company in Asia based in Singapore. Currently, PDG has 19 data centers spread across five countries, including China, Japan, Singapore, India, and Indonesia within four years of its establishment. PDG is also building a flagship data center campus with a capacity of 100MW in Japan.

PDG’s Chairman and CEO, Rangu Salgame said the company intends to strengthen its position as a data center leader in Asia Pacific. It is due to Asia Pacific as the region with the largest data center in the world. In order to achieve this target, the company has relied on three strategies over the past four years, acquisitions, takeovers and upgrades, and the construction of new data centers.

“We continue to build a massive data center portfolio spread across key Asian markets. PDG has become an option for those who need hyperscale data storage in various countries. The PDG growth in Indonesia proven that this business is rapidly growing in our business partners’ important markets,” Salgame said.

PDG Indonesia’s Managing Director, Stephanus Tumbelaka added, this expansion is an effort to accommodate the growing data center needs, especially in the consumer, business and government sectors in the Greater Jakarta area. He also sees that this increasing need is also triggered by the growth of startups in Indonesia, which is among the fastest in Southeast Asia.

With the additional data center capacity, he expects to serve the needs of cloud, internet, and other sector companies that require large data center capacity with good flexibility and reliability.

“We see Jakarta as an attractive market, also Cibitung as the leading cloud cluster in the region. With the rapid digitization by the government and the private sector, the current market situation is important for PDG’s strategy,” Stephanus said.

PDG in Indonesia is located in five areas, including Greater Jakarta (Cibitung and Bintaro), Surabaya, Bandung, and Pekanbaru.

The growing collocation in Jakarta

Based on the Structure Research report, the market value of data center collocations in Jakarta reaches $215.6 million in 2020. With this market value, the CAGR rate of data center collocations in Jakarta is projected to reach 23.7% in 2025. Taking into account the data centers built in 2020, the market This collocation in the Indonesian capital is estimated to have a capacity of 72MW.

This projection sets Jakarta as a market with the need for a large-scale data center (hyperscale) in a short time. It is because Jakarta is the center of national economic activity, the basis of the central government, and large business enterprises.

Based on the report, collocation is considered to be the right option for developing countries, such as Indonesia, aiming for efficiency in managing their business. Meanwhile, East and Central Jakarta are noted to have the most established data center clusters compared to other areas.

With the uneven distribution of internet infrastructure in Indonesia, Structure Research says that all online activities will rely heavily on large-scale cloud services, and the infrastructure must also be connected to data center facilities.

This report reveals that large-scale cloud infrastructure and collocation services in Jakarta are still in their early stages. This condition eventually prompted a number of foreign players, such as Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud, to enter this segment.

Alibaba Cloud was listed as the first hyperscale platform to arrive in Jakarta market in 2018, while Google Cloud brought their first regional cloud service to Jakarta in 2020.

“In the 2020-2021 period, we will see a large-scale aggressive expansion of Alibaba and Google in expanding their cloud infrastructure in Indonesia,” as stated in the report.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian