Hong Kong-based Turbidite said this morning that it is creating its Turbidite Guam project in association with IT&E, the local telco in Guam, which is a subsidiary of Prospector Pacific.
“Over the past year, there has been an increase in connectivity requirements through Guam, which is the lowest latency point of US soil to the growing economies of Asia Pacific,” said Barney (pictured), CEO of Turbidite. The companies gave no price for the deal.
“Increasingly, tech companies are looking for highly connected and secure carrier-neutral data centres to store their edge nodes. Turbidite Guam will build a central IX [internet exchange] for inbound cables destined for Asia.”
Guam is an island in the Pacific, some 1,500km east of the Philippines and 2,000km south of Japan. It is an unincorporated territory of the US in Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is a nearby cluster of islands, also US territory. They have about 230,000 people between them.
Last September Capacity announced that Barney was to join the board of Prospector Pacific as a non-executive director, though he was not due to join until February 2021.
“I have known IT&E since my first days in the 1990s working in the Asia Pacific region,” he said in September. “I am honoured and look forward to joining the Prospector Pacific board to support IT&E and their other ventures into a new stage of growth during this rapidly evolving era of digital transformation.”
Turbidite, which is backed by Hong Kong real estate investor New World Development, plans to set up three data centre operations in Asia before the end of the year. The Guam project is the first of the three.
Jim Beighley, CEO of Prospector Pacific, said: “Upon completion, Turbidite Guam will be a main anchor point to release the bottleneck we are currently experiencing in this market, enabling us to provide added value to our existing and prospective customers.”
He said design and planning are underway to convert the current IT&E brownfield building into a state-of-the-art 3MW Tier III+ data centre, with future expansion to 10MW capacity. The new facility will feature open meet-me rooms with fibre-on-demand to all current and future cable landing stations in Guam.
Turbidite Guam will provide comprehensive value-added services, to support multinational corporations, large internet companies and other hyperscalers that wish to establish or enhance footprints in the Asia Pacific region. The new facility is expected to be operational in 2022.
Barney has not announced the other two projects he is working on, but in an interview with Capacity to be published this week on our website here he said: “There’s one set of assets spun out of a telco. Another is on a brownfield site. There’s a subsea cable landing station. There are not a lot of open ones around the world.”
The potential acquisitions “are in strategic locations. We have three deals in parallel. We’re building a franchise across a bunch of geographies.”
IT&E is a joint venture between Prospector Pacific and SK Telecom of South Korea. Prospector Pacific is jointly owned by Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan and Citadel Pacific, a Philippines investor in energy, real estate and retail.
