Hong Kong based construction company Grand Ming Group, has topped out a newly-built 15-story data center tower in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong.

The new iTech Tower 2 facility is the first purpose-built data center building in Hong Kong riding on a government policy favoring data center development. It is the Group’s first purpose build data center, but is actually its second high-rise facility, following the conversion of an existing building to create iTech Tower 1 nearby

The new building cost an estimated US$88m (or HK$682 million), and was built under the government’s Policy of Lease Modification for Development of an Industrial Lot for High-tier Data Center Use. It is expected to accommodate 1,400 racks in its gross floor area of 108,000 square feet (10,000 sq m) when it is scheduled to be online in the fourth quarter of this year.

Tier IV ready

The Group said iTech Tower 2 is designed with Tier IV ready specification with a reliability of 99.999 percent WSP, an established engineering consulting firms, chartered the design and oversaw the project.

The power will be provided by the local utility CLP Power Hong Kong with a diverse feed from different primary substations. Upon full completion, the facility will comprise 14 transformers, which will support servers of nearly 6MW (equivalent to 12,000 dual-processor servers) power capacity.

Once online, iTech Tower 2 will provide colocation services to multi-national data center operators, telecommunication companies and financial institutions. However, the Group told Datacenter Dynamics, iTech Tower 2 will have a different business approach compared with typical collocation service providers. “It will allow customers to have dedicated resources from CRAC, UPS up to the generator or even the transformer,” said Herbert Chan, general manager of the group’s data center business.

iTech Tower 2 will be operated by iTech Tower, the data center business unit under Grand Ming Group. iTech Tower also operates iTech Tower 1, a facility which is converted from an industrial building and has offered services since 2008. In late 2012, the business unit acquired the land for the development of iTech Tower 2.

Grand Ming Group is the first company applying for lease modification to convert an existing industrial site to high-tier data center use. And iTech Tower 1 represents such a conversion success.