The partners will build and operate a 21MW internet data centre in Greater Seoul with a development cost of $315 million.
The company said that the data centre will be capable of hosting cloud service providers, which will allow them to address mismatches between supply and demand in Seoul.
Seoul has a 95% smartphone penetration and has seen mobile data traffic increase by 26 times since 2012.
The new eight-storey facility is GS E&C’s tenth data centre project and will be built to Tier 3 standards.
The facility will feature 1,600 high-density racks for CSP clients, and a further 400 low-density racks for colocation customers, according to the company. It will be located within the Pyeongchon Cluster in Seoul.
“Seoul has an insatiable appetite for data but is struggling to meet demand with fewer than five largescale non-owner-occupied data centres currently available in the market,” said Brian Chinappi, Head of Asia real estate at Actis.
“This investment, where land and grid power has been secured in an area popular with cloud service providers, will directly help to address that challenge.
“We are pleased to be working with GS E&C, an experienced local contractor that has built 185MW of existing internet data centre capacity. Together this project will deliver another critical piece of digital infrastructure for Korea.”
The investment is a continuation of Actis’ build-to-core strategy in Korea. The firm has created a Chinese data centre platform, Chayora Holdings, to develop hyperscale data centre facilities to serve China’s Tier 1 markets.
Earlier this year, Actis also established a $250m Pan-African data centre platform, starting with an investment in Rack Centre in Lagos, Nigeria.
