Multipolar Technology is starting work on a $100 million eight-storey, data center in Java, aiming to boost Indonesia's role in the cloud.
A subsidiary of the Lippo Group, Multipolar plans to spend $200 million on its data center business, and work should start before the end of 2014 on the first floor of the data center located in Benkasi, close to the capital Jakarta, according to reports on Reuters and the Jakarta Globe.
The Java jive
The Indonesian government has declared that public services must host all their data within the country, in a move that at the same time promotes "data sovereignty" while boosting local industry. Indonesia has a high use of data, but ranks low in the local data center stakes.
Multipolar, a part of Lippo Group, plans to break ground on its first data center in West Java next month, marking a $200 million venture into the data center business. The work is being done by Multipolar subsidiary Graha Teknologi Nusantara (GTN).
The Benkasi data center is planned to have eight floors, with a total of 12,000 square meters and 8,000 racks, but Multipolar is taking it in stages, one storey at a time.
“We hope the ground breaking of the data center will commence in early December," Multipolar chief executive Benni Lim told the Jakarta Globe, "as we want the first stage of construction, which is the data center’s first floor, to begin operations in early 2016." The first floor will cost $16 million, and the rest will be funded by revenue from tenants in that floor,
Multipolar hopes to finish the eight-storey creation in 2018, and host a mix of online service providers, banks, oil and gas firms and government institutions, as well as smaller busineses. The eight-story data center, which is estimated for completion in 2018, will cost $100 million and occupy some 12,000 square meters land in the Cikarang area of Bekasi, Benni said.
A second data center costing another $100 million is projected after the first is complete.
IT spending in Indonesia estimated at $16.8 billion this year, says IDC, and the government is wooing big players such as Google and Amazon to locate data centers in the country. Australian telco Telstra has located there, along with Telkom Indonesia, which also signed a deal with IBM in 2013.
Fiber communicaitons with the country are being updated with the 20Tbps SEA-US cable.