The company is also looking at expanding into South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, in addition to its four existing countries: China, India, Indonesia and Singapore.
“We are already at 350MW capacity and over the next couple of years we will be adding significant capacity,” chairman and CEO Rangu Salgame (pictured) told Data Economy and Capacity.
In China alone the company has a number of projects in progress that will see its capacity expand. “We will be able to build 300MW in the next 12-24 months,” said Salgame.
This follows last month’s news that PDG will be building one of the largest new greenfield campuses in the Mumbai region, which is also its first data centre in India. The data centre is scheduled to be service-ready by 2022 and will have 48MW of critical IT capacity across two buildings.
PDG has expanded its China plans because the existing Shanghai data centre campus, with 42MW, is fully contracted. PDG has also started construction of its 43 MW campus in Nanjing and has begun design work on its 60 MW campus in Nantong.
“We have also sold all our capacity in Singapore,” said Salgame, referring to an acquisition from IO Data Centers two years ago. “We transformed it into a hyperscale data centre and sold all the capacity,” said Salgame.
“And now all our capacity in Shanghai is sold out,” he said. “We are looking at acquisitions in Beijing and Shenzhen.” That city is on the China side of the border with Hong Kong SAR, and is the home of high-technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE.
“We will be announcing more in India soon,” said Salgame, pointing to Chennai as a likely location. “In Indonesia we are expanding capacity in existing data centres, and building more.”
PDG will continue with its approach of acquiring existing data centres, including some acquisitions from telecoms companies, and building greenfield developments.
“Telcos have been good at data centres,” said Salgame. “The problems are all about capital. Data centres have become increasingly capital-intensive and telco CFOs worry about getting the money.” Shareholders in telcos are concerned about the amount of investment needed in data centres, he said.
PDG said that the $230 million of debt financing from China Merchants Bank would open the way to $1 billion of expansion across China. PDG’s main shareholders are Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Warburg Pincus.
“This debt from China Merchants Bank is a testament to our ability to successfully execute on our strategy to build and deliver scale across APAC’s fastest-growing markets,” said Salgame. “Our execution track record has helped us win business from some of the world’s largest cloud companies.”
