Alpha Investment Partners will acquire Huizhou Bike, a company looking to build a data center in the Tonghu Smart City in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, China.

Tonghu was developed by Huizhou Bike's owners, the Chinese property giant, Country Garden Holdings.

The data center will now be managed through the Alpha DC Fund, a subsidiary of Alpha, itself the private fund management arm of Keppel Capital. The facility will become the fund's first mainland Chinese asset.

Country Garden will still be involved in the process since it owns the park in which the facility will be built and Alpha's sibling, Keppel Data Centres, will be lending a hand in building the facility.

Investing in Huizhou

Alpha is investing around RMB 1.5bn ($213m) to complete the acquisition and fund the building project.

Chinese data center company Shenzhen Huateng Smart Technology will operate the facility when fully developed.

When complete, the Huizhou data center will fit more than 6,000 high-density racks and have China Data Centre Class A GB-standard equivalent specifications.

It will cover an area of 487,000 sq ft (45,000 sq m) and will be built over two phases. The first phase is expected to be completed in 2021 and the second in 2022.

According to Keppel, the data center also comes with another potential 538,000 sq ft (50,000 sq m) of possible space, bringing its total footprint to approximately 1,025,000 sq ft (95,000 sq m) if exploited.

“Demand for quality data centers has been increasing rapidly with the expansion of the digital economy globally," Alpha CEO Alvin Mah said.

“Alpha DC Fund is pleased to be able to capitalize on such growth in the Asia Pacific region through our investment in this project, which will be the Fund’s first asset in China. This investment will provide further diversification to the Fund’s portfolio, and enhance the risk-adjusted returns for our investors."