The DatacenterDynamics Industry Census for 2012 proved just how large China's appetite for data centers has become, projecting 20% growth over the next five years. So we weren't too surprised to see that our global audience has a hunger for stories looking at the Chinese market. News about rising demand for cloud services, when Gartner predicted the Chinese cloud computing market would reach US$31.6bn in three years in May, topped our hit list for APAC in 2012. Another big one was when Baidu and Tencent announced plans for new cloud computing centers in August (Baidu's 120,000 sq m and Tencent's accommodating 100,000 servers).

India also received a lot of attention, mostly for the size of Tulip Telecom's new data center, which opened in February. Tulip Data City is Asia's largest and the world's third largest data center. In July, GPX Global Systems opened South Asia's first Tier IV data center, and in August India made headlines with a fire that had broken out in a government data center used for the country's Unique ID biometric project, destroying between 150 and 250 servers. Back-up housed by Bharti Airtel, however, meant the records were kept intact.

Japan said it had installed a supercomputer with Bull for use in nuclear-fusion research in March. It carried out the 70,560-core Helios project with the French Atomic Energy Agency.

Digital Realty Trust, at DCD Singapore in October, said it could also be looking to invest in Japan. This is just part of Digital’s massive plans for APAC. It said it would also like to expand in Australia and Hong Kong, where it already has a presence. Australia is fast improving its standing as a global hub for data centers: Digital opened its Erskine Park facility in November, and Equinix opened a data center in Sydney. Our online audience was interested to hear in February that Rackspace was also considering presence in the nation – a rumour that was confirmed later in the year. Amazon also started operating out of two facilities in Sydney in November.

This article first ran in the latest issue of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine (follow link for free subscription).