Singapore’s Empyrion Digital Enters Taiwan With 7MW Taipei Data Centre Project

Singapore-based Empyrion Digital has established a presence in a fourth Asian market with the development of a 7-megawatt co-location data centre in Taiwan.

The operator backed by infrastructure fund manager Seraya Partners has secured 10MW of electricity for the Taipei facility, dubbed TW1, at a time when power shortages are creating challenges for new entrants, Empyrion said Monday in a release.

The project is situated in Taipei’s technology-led Neihu business district, a network-dense area home to the headquarters of gaming and electronics firms. TW1’s design aims to meet the needs of cloud and AI computing that legacy assets are struggling to accommodate, the company said.

“We are excited to expand into Taiwan and this investment is another step forward in the company’s ambition to grow in Asia where land and power are scarce,” said Empyrion Digital CEO Mark Fong. “With its robust semiconductor industry and tech-savvy talent pool, Taiwan is a strategic location for us to build the next generation of AI-ready data centres.”

Green Certification Sought

TW1 is to begin construction in 2025 and enter service by 2027. The facility aims for a power usage effectiveness — the ratio of the amount of power entering a data centre to the power used to run the IT equipment within it — of 1.33 or lower, with a water usage effectiveness of close to net zero. Empyrion will seek Taiwan’s Green Building Gold certification for the project.

The latest news comes two months after Empyrion announced its maiden investment in Japan with the planned development of a 25MW carrier-neutral data centre in central Tokyo. The JP1 facility is a partnership with an unnamed local investor described as one of Japan’s largest diversified financial services groups, with construction expected to commence in 2025.

Empyrion currently operates a 7.7MW data centre in Singapore and is building a 29.4MW facility in Seoul. The company is also exploring development of carrier-neutral facilities in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam and has identified additional site locations in Bangkok and Jakarta.

“TW1 will add to our existing data centre cluster in Singapore, Korea and Japan, ensuring we are well-positioned to capture wholesale and edge co-location demand and empower our customers with flexible deployment solutions across the four markets,” Fong said.

The Taiwan data centre is the first Empyrion project to be announced since last month’s appointment of Amandine Wang as the company’s chief commercial officer. Wang previously served as CEO of Flow Digital Infrastructure, a Singapore-based unit of Hong Kong private equity firm PAG.

Emerging Player

Taiwan ranks 10th among Asia Pacific data centre markets in terms of operational capacity with 246MW, Cushman & Wakefield said in a recent report. The island is expected to generate co-location revenue of $226.2 million in 2024, rising to $346 million by 2029, according to Mordor Intelligence.

Last month, Singapore’s Keppel Ltd announced the development of its first Taiwan data centre, an 80MW campus in the northern region, under a partnership with Decarbonization Solutions Platform, a startup backed by asset management titan BlackRock.

In July, Google unveiled an investment in New Green Power, a Taipei-based solar developer wholly owned by a BlackRock-managed fund, as part of a partnership with BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure business that will help the US tech giant power its data centre campus in Taiwan.