Bangladesh is looking to build a large data center that it claims will be the world’s fifth largest. This was announced by State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak at a press conference in Dhaka, the South Asia country’s capital, and reported by the Bangladesh-based bdnews24.com online newspaper.

To be located on about 20 acres of land, the data center will be equipped with cloud computing and G-Cloud (Government Cloud) technologies, according to the junior minister at a press conference where he outlined plans to advance the country’s information technology capabilities. The announceement confirmed earlier rumours of the site, which has drawn criticism becaquse - despite claims of Tier IV reliability, it is being built in an earthquake zone.

Chinese help with Tier IV project

“The signing of a commercial agreement with the Chinese government to build this Tier IV certified center is in the final stages,” said Palak. “We hope to start the construction the project infrastructure this year… It can be situated in the High Tech Park being built at Kaliakoir (in Gazipur).”

Separately, ESDS Software Solution, which is headquartered in Nashik, India, announced that it is investing about 3.35 billion rupees (US$54.3 million) to set up three data centers in India over the next 24 months, according to India broadsheet The Hindu.

Specifically, ESDS Software is setting up a 200,000 sq ft data center in Navi Mumbai, a 100,000 sq ft data center in Bengaluru and a 50,000 sq ft data center in Nashik. The Navi Mumbai data center will see an investment of 2 billion Indian rupee from ESDS Software (US$32.4M), while the Bengaluru and Nashik data centers will see 1 billion rupee (US$16.2M) and 350 million rupees (US$5.6M) in investments respectively.

On top of that, the company is also planning on be setting up an additional 450,000 sq ft of data center space in the next 24 months.

“We see a good demand for data centers in the country, with the cloud now getting a good acceptance,” said Piyush Somani, managing director and chief executive officer at ESDS Software. “Further, the growth of e-commerce, big data, Internet of Things and telecommunication among others would result in an increased need for data centers.”

Among others, ESDS Software currently counts companies such as Pizza Hut, Essel Propack and Maharashtra State Election Commission as clients.