Gaw Capital JV Completes First Phase of Data Centre in Indonesia’s Batam

Fund manager Gaw Capital Partners has opened the 5.2-megawatt first phase of a data centre on the Indonesian island of Batam, near Singapore, as digital infrastructure investors continue to favour Southeast Asian markets.

The two-part development at Batam’s Nongsa Digital Park is the maiden project of Golden Digital Gateway, a joint venture of Hong Kong-based Gaw and Sinar Primera Group, an industrial developer with links to Jakarta-based heavyweight Sinar Mas.

The facility offers low-latency connectivity to Singapore, achieving less than 2 milliseconds via diverse routing for redundancy, and is entering service just over nine months after construction began, Gaw said Thursday in a release.

“This achievement is a testament to our shared commitment to providing cutting-edge digital infrastructure in Indonesia, paving the way for a brighter, more connected future,” said Kok Chye Ong, Gaw’s head of data centres for Asia ex-China.

Near-Shoring Play

The first phase of the carrier-neutral, co-location data centre boasts Tier III status, carrying an expectation of less than 1.6 hours of downtime annually. The project will deliver an additional 20MW of capacity in the second phase, Gaw said without specifying a timeline.

Nongsa Digital Park is a special economic zone launched by Indonesia and Singapore in 2018 as a “digital bridge” between the neighbouring countries. Gaw and Sinar Primera foresee clients in the Lion City using the new facility as part of a near-shoring strategy.

“The presence of this data centre in Batam will open new opportunities for companies that require world-class IT infrastructure at a more competitive cost compared to Singapore,” said Sinar Primera Group head Hong Kah Jin. “We believe that this collaboration will accelerate the development of a stronger digital ecosystem in Indonesia.”

Nongsa Digital Park has grown in popularity among international data centre operators, with Warburg Pincus-backed Princeton Digital Group currently building a 96MW campus there and China’s GDS developing its own hyperscale complex in partnership with Indonesia’s sovereign fund.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, privately held Gaw launched a 12MW data centre in Malaysia’s Cyberjaya in 2023 under a joint venture with Singapore-based data centre player A3 Capital. That deal followed Gaw’s entry into the Vietnamese data centre market with the 2022 purchase of a greenfield plot at Saigon Hi-Tech Park for a 20MW facility.

Emerging Powerhouse

At the end of last June, Indonesia stood as the ninth-largest Asia Pacific data centre market in terms of both operational capacity and total market size (operational, under construction and planned) with 296MW and 1,046MW respectively, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report.

BDx Indonesia, a joint venture of Singapore’s Big Data Exchange, Jakarta-based Indosat and local IT firm Lintasarta, last year acquired the data centre portfolio of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison for IDR 2.6 billion ($170 million), giving the JV a set of 10 sites in Jakarta, Surabaya, Batam, Medan, Makassar, Bandung and Semarang.

Another Singaporean operator, Stonepeak-backed Digital Edge, opened a second data centre in Jakarta last year, adding 23MW of capacity just 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) from the platform’s existing facility in Jalan Kuningan Barat, the most carrier-dense area in the capital.