Logos Leaps Into Data Centres With 20MW Jakarta Project

After riding Asia Pacific’s e-commerce wave in establishing a portfolio of 6 million square metres (64.6 million square feet) of warehouse projects, Australia’s Logos Property is adding data centres to its arsenal of projects through an Indonesian joint venture unveiled Wednesday.

For its first-ever server facility, the unit of ARA Asset Management has partnered with the UK’s Pure Data Centres to begin developing a 20-megawatt hyperscale facility in Jakarta, as the company ventures into another property sector driven by the internet economy.

“We are very pleased to be welcoming our new data centre partner, Pure, as we push ahead with our investment in this growing sector,” said Logos managing director Stephen Hawkins. “The significant growth in data centres is being driven by gains in online commerce alongside the need for critical cloud service infrastructure to support their business expansion and client requirements.”

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Logos’s expansion into data centres follows just a few months after regional rival ESR bought an Osaka site for its first server facility, as Asia’s warehouse giants look to leverage their development expertise and access to capital in yet another fast-growing market.

Fund Managers Fan Out

The Jakarta project, the precise location of which was undisclosed, marks the first data centre development in Indonesia for Pure, a London-headquartered company that designs, builds and operates hyperscale facilities.

The 20,000 square metre data centre is under construction and will be ready for customer operation in the first quarter of 2022, Sydney-based Logos said in a release.

The Jakarta project reflects the partners’ commitment to Indonesia’s data centre market and will provide significant capacity for Southeast Asia’s biggest economy and its substantial number of home-grown tech businesses, Logos said.

Asia Pacific’s data centre segment continues to attract capital from global players with financial muscle like Logos, whose other shareholders include Ivanhoe Cambridge of Canada, and Pure, which is backed by US investment firm Oaktree Capital Management.

Founded in 2013, Pure was formerly known as Global Data Centres Ltd and now has facilities across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, in addition to Asia, where it has projects in place in India and Vietnam.

Hong Kong-listed ESR revealed its $2.15 billion Osaka data centre project in April, with plans to develop up to 78MW of capacity. In late 2020, France’s AXA Investment Managers paid $210 million for a 20,000 square metre South Tokyo facility capable of hosting 2,560 server racks.

Indonesia Active

For Logos, the Indonesian data centre push comes after the Aussie firm opened 2021 with the announcement of a JV with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to develop new warehouses in the Greater Jakarta area. The CPPIB has committed $200 million to the initiative.

In the same locale, Singapore-based Digital Edge this week said it paid $165 million to acquire a controlling interest and become the largest shareholder in data centre operator Indonet. The investment adds the EDGE1 data centre in Jakarta to Digital Edge’s portfolio, bringing the private-equity-backed platform’s regional footprint to seven facilities across three countries.

Cushman & Wakefield’s latest global market comparison identified Jakarta as a fast-growing regional hub for co-location data centres, with a sizeable development pipeline.

In April, the cloud unit of Chinese tech giant Tencent announced the launch of its first Indonesian internet data centre in Jakarta’s CBD. The facility is already fully operational, Tencent Cloud said.

In May, a unit of Singaporean tech firm ST Telemedia revealed that it was joining forces with its owner, state holding company Temasek, and Indonesian conglomerate Triputra Group to develop a data centre operating platform in Jakarta. The joint venture will build its first data centre campus at Greenland International Industrial Center in Kota Deltamas, a township east of the Indonesian capital, with up to 72MW of critical IT capacity.