Digital Edge (Singapore) Holdings Pte. Ltd. today announced the establishment of a joint venture in the Philippines with the Threadborne Group, a local family office focused on technology and real estate.

The JV will construct and operate a 10MW data center in Manila, with a capital commitment in excess of USD100 million collectively from both parties. The new data center will be based on Digital Edge’s next-generation architecture and operated under the Digital Edge brand name.

Already under construction, the Manila data center is slated to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2022. It will be the largest operational carrier-neutral data center in the Philippines. The facility also aims to be the most advanced facility in the market, in terms of energy and water efficiency, with an expected annualized PUE of 1.193 at optimal operating temperature and WUE of 1.355.  The facility will allow Digital Edge to offer flexible, high-quality colocation and interconnection services to both local and international customers in the Greater Manila region. The low PUE and WUE make the facility uniquely suitable in the market for cloud and other high power density colocation applications.

According to Structure Research, the Philippines’s colocation market is expected to become a US$313M market by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 22% between 2021 and 2026. Jabez Tan, Head of Research at Structure Research, notes that “Alibaba Cloud is currently the first and only hyper-scale cloud platform to announce a cloud region deployment in Manila, Philippines, and we believe more cloud region announcements will soon follow in the next two years driven by the overall decentralization of hyper-scale cloud platforms into more distributed and in-country data center architectures to cater for the increasing performance requirements and data privacy regulations.

“The Philippines is an underserved market with huge demand for data center capacity and, together with the Threadborne Group, we intend to be at the forefront of developing the critical data center infrastructure for this market,” said Samuel Lee, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Edge. “The Threadborne Group’s principals are experienced real estate developers with a proven track record and we are very pleased to have joined forces with them to undertake this important initiative. This venture is another step forward in the Company’s ambition to transform Asia’s digital infrastructure by building and operating the most energy-efficient and connectivity-rich data centers in key emerging markets.”

“Digital Edge’s knowledge and experience in designing, constructing, and operating data centers combined with our local real estate and customer knowledge, has created a solid foundation on which to grow this partnership,” said Raymond Rufino, Principal for Investments and Real Estate of the Threadborne Group. “Digital Edge shares our strong conviction for this market and in the importance of setting robust, long-term ESG goals. We are already receiving very positive feedback from a number of potential customers and are confident that this is just the beginning!”

“We are very excited about the energy and water efficiency achieved in the design of the Digital Edge Manila data center. Given Manila’s hot and humid climate, it is extremely difficult to achieve an annualized PUE of 1.193 at the optimal operating temperature, but the team has been able to achieve an impressive result,” said Jay Park, Chief Development Officer of Digital Edge.

The WUE of 1.355 is also significant in that it uses less than a quarter of the water needed for cooling when compared to traditional-style cooling tower type setups. These are industry-leading numbers. We will be seeking LEED Gold certification, EDGE certification, and participating as an early pilot partner for BERDE (Philippines Local Green Building Certification). This data center will most certainly put the Philippines into the league of having one of the most advanced data centers in Asia.