The new project already has over 200MW of IT capacity under development across three identified projects.
A 23MW facility is planned in central Taipei, Taiwan and a 120MW campus is under development in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Actis has not disclosed the IT load of its third project but did say it is being built in Seoul, South Korea.
Actis said that Epoch Digital is deliberately developing, owning and operating a geographically diverse portfolio of data centres, as it aims to capitalise on imminent demand in markets where there is big investment from hyperscalers and cloud providers in Asia.
Newly named CEO and COO Hak Kiat Chng and Pei Ping Lim have already worked together for over a decade and led the full lifecycle development of more than 250MW of IT capacity in Epoch Digital’s target markets.
Both Chng and Lim spent time at Keppel Data Centres and DCI Data Centres, with Chng serving as COO at both in his most recent roles.
Lim on the other hand acted as director of operations at DCI and general manager of business operations at Keppel.
Chng said the larger data centre capacities targeted by the company are a result of the increase in demand for AI compute power.
Interestingly, Actis said the project in Malaysia “is aimed at meeting data centre demand from neighbouring country, Singapore, where a moratorium on data centre development was enacted in 2019”.
That moratorium though was effectively lifted last month when the Government of Singapore announced it was freeing up 300MW of capacity for new data centres, with the potential for a further 200MW to follow.
Still, Johor is anticipated to experience a significant boom in data centre capacity over the coming years, with projections indicating the region could top 11GW of IT load.
Reacting to the news in Singapore, data centre consultant Daryl Dunbar said while Singapore is one of the largest and oldest regional hubs for data centres, other regions are being explored at haste.
“Singapore risks losing out to neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia,” he says.
At time of publication, Actis did not respond to a request for comment explaining the implications of the removal of the moratorium on the Johor project.
