Asia Pacific data center and cloud providers are among the fastest growing in the world, with cloud revenue far outstripping data center revenue, says a new report by Datacentrepricing.

Specifically, forecasts by Datacentrepricing pegged cloud revenue in the region at four times more than data centre revenue over the four-year period to the beginning of 2025, with cloud revenue projected to increase by 87 percent and data centre revenue by 22 percent.

Fast growth

The new report looked at the market landscape for data centers and cloud services in the region, namely Southeast Asia countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as Australia, China (and Hong Kong), Japan South Korea, and Taiwan – but not India.

According to the report, there is one sq m of data center space for every 522 peope in the Asia Pacific region, with hubs such as Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore having a notably higher data center floor space “per head” than the rest of Asia.

Unsurprisingly, China has the largest data center space in the APAC (and second largest globally), accounting for 43 percent of data center space in the region with 1.7 million sq m of space forecast for 2021. Datacentrepricing pointed to the high annual revenue growth rates of data center operators in China such as 21vianet Group and GDS Holdings, which reported annual revenue growth rates of 25 percent and 39 percent for Q1 2020, respectively.

Elsewhere, the next largest data centrer market in APAC are Australia and Japan with 11 percent each, with Singapore in fourth place with 10 percent.

Singapore is understood to be under a moratorium on new data centres that could last until 2021, though it is unclear if it is still in effect: Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and Keppel Corporation in July this year announced a joint venture to develop and operate a data center at SPH’s current Genting Lane property.