Gennext Technologies has launched operations at Bangladesh's first cloud data center.
The facility, dubbed Meghna Cloud, is located in the Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City in Kaliakoir, Gazipur.
According to the Meghna Cloud website, it is hosted in a Tier IV data center. The only data center listed as UpTime Tier IV in Bangladesh is the National Data Centre established by the government in 2019. This facility is run by Bangladesh Data Centre Company Limited (BDCCL), a partner of Meghna Cloud, and is located in Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City.
According to the BDCCL website, the data center spans 200,000 sq ft (18,580 sqm), and has eight 2.5MW generators.
The data center will provide cloud infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking equipment at software technology. It is expected to serve both government and private entities, enabling Bangladeshi organizations to no longer depend solely on foreign cloud providers. Currently, the majority of data in Bangladesh comes through Singaporean servers, which have around 60 milliseconds of latency.
Development of the cloud offering has been on-going since December 2022 when Gennext formed a joint venture with BDCCL for the project.
Gennext handled the building of the data center, and will also cover operations and maintenance for Meghna Cloud, while sales and marketing of the offering is being handled by BDCCL.
Gennext is planning to invest $500m in the facility over the next five years.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, Bangladesh's State Minister for Post, Telecommunications, and Information Technology, said that the development will help Bangladesh to improve its data security.
In addition, Gennext will provide cloud-related technology to around 5,000 students annually.
“Meghna Cloud will support the Smart Bangladesh move forward. We are also setting up a research and development center for teachers and students of both government and private universities," said Touhidul Islam Chaudhury, chairman of Gennext Technologies.
The country as a whole has a relatively small data center market, with the majority of facilities located in the capital city Dhaka. According to Data Center Journal, Bangladesh has 16 data centers in Dhaka.
Despite a fairly minimal colocation market in the country, there are local players such as Felicity IDC and Red.Digital, while the government operates an Uptime Tier IV-certified data center in the capital.
Earlier this month, Bangladeshi telco Grameenphone launched its first Super Core data center in Sylhet, which offers an IT capacity of 4MW.
In February 2023, Indian data center firm Yotta Infrastructure announced plans to invest 20 billion Bangladeshi Taka ($190.5m) in developing a hyperscale data center park in Dhaka in the next four to six years.
In September, Saudi firm DataVolt announced it was planning a campus in the country just outside the capital city for which it would invest around $100m.
