Equinix has announced its fifth data center in Singapore, a greenfield facility located at Tanjong Kling, previously known as the Singapore data center park.
With a first-phase investment of US$144 million, the nine-story SG5 will be the tallest data center in Singapore when it opens in H1 2021 – at least until Facebook's US$1billion, 11-story data center is ready in 2022.
Towering ambition
SG5 will provide an initial capacity of more than 1,300 cabinets in 1,710 sq m (18,400 sq ft) of colocation space in the first phase. At full buildout, the facility will provide up to 5,000 cabinets, with a total colocation space of close to 12,000 sq m (129,000 sq ft).
Equinix says SG5 will strengthen its cross-island presence and location diversity: SG5 is in visual sight of SG2; SG1 and SG3 are located side by side, while SG4 is located in Tai Seng in the East. Excluding SG5, the four other Equinix data centers currently provide more than 43,500 sq m (468,000 sq ft) of colocation space.
SG5 will be directly connected to the four existing Equinix IBX data centers in Singapore via dark fiber links to interconnect with more than 705 companies, says Equinix, allowing customers to access network services from over 200 providers.
"Singapore continues to thrive as a regional digital hub despite current pandemic and economic challenges. Today’s businesses demand a solid digital infrastructure to grow and scale, leveraging vital ecosystems and cloud services via Platform Equinix,” said Yee May Leong, the managing director of Equinix South Asia.
“We are catering to the needs and demands of our customers by expanding our local footprint to enable regional and global growth as Singapore continues its Smart Nation journey and enterprises pursue digital transformation,” she said.
As we reported last year, concerns over the carbon footprint of data centers in Singapore have led to an “implicit” moratorium on new data centers until 2021. Apart from SPH and Keppel’s joint venture announced earlier this year, there had been no new data centers announced since it took effect in 2019 – work at the SG5 site had begun before that.
