The new facility, Digital Seoul 1 (ICN10), will act as a gateway for Korean enterprises wanting to globally scale their digital business into new markets, as well as businesses wanting to enter the Korean market.
ICN10 is a multi-story 22,000 sq ft facility and located in the north west of Seoul within Sangam Digital Media City, a newly developed urban planning zone home to technology and media companies.
With 12MW of critical IT capacity, the new facility will expand the availability of PlatformDIGITAL, Digital Realty's data centre platform, scale digital businesses and support the development of South Korea as a data hub.
"South Korea is a leading technology and digital hub in Asia Pacific and is set to be one of the fastest growing data centre markets in the region," said Mark Smith (pictured), managing director of APAC, Digital Realty.
"The opening of our first data centre in South Korea today is set to meet the growing demand from enterprises looking to scale their digital footprint across APAC and beyond, as well as deliver greater connectivity, coverage and capacity."
As a carrier-neutral data centre site, ICN10 offers enterprises connectivity with direct access to all local exchange carriers in Korea.
It is also a NVIDIA-certified colocation provider in South Korea as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center program, meaning that the facility is designed to handle AI and machine learning workloads from NVIDIA.
"South Korea has consistently been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology adoption in areas such as micropayment transactions, esports and gaming," added Smith.
"As it continues to stay in the lead for internet-based economic development, we can expect an upward trajectory in the volume of data exchange and corresponding demand for data centre services in the country over the next few years.
In addition, ICN10 will act as the connectivity gateway for scale and large enterprise applications hosted in Digital Seoul 2 (ICN11), which is currently under construction, forming a virtually connected campus.
Both facilities will be connected via the Metro Connect system, Digital Realty's point-to-point connectivity solution, to extend the ICN10 communities out to the core locations.
"ICN10 will be critical to our go-to market strategy in Seoul and be complementary to ICN11, our hyperscale campus," said Jay Weon Khym, country manager for Digital Realty Korea.
"It will be uniquely equipped to help organisations reinvent IT using a data-centric approach and unlock data gravity, the effect seen when data accumulates in massive amounts."
