SC Zeus is kicking off with a $500 mil South Korea project
Singapore-based SC Capital Partners has launched an Asia data centre platform, starting with the development of a hyperscale South Korean facility at an expected cost of $500 million.
Headquartered at the investment manager’s Nassim Road office, SC Zeus Data Centers will build a 45-megawatt data centre in Seoul and has already set up an Asia Pacific pipeline with 250MW of total IT load, SC Capital said in a release.
The firm has hired industry veteran Joe Gooi, formerly of US giant Digital Realty, as chief executive of the new platform. SC Zeus is a joint venture of SC Capital and Singapore-based Abner Investments, according to a report in the Global Legal Chronicle.
“SC Capital Partners has been following the Asia Pacific data centre markets closely and made its first investment into this sector last year on behalf of our latest opportunistic private equity real estate fund, RECAP V,” said chairman and founder Suchad Chiaranussati. “Based on the opportunities that we see in the market and the surging interest in this sector, we are extremely excited to work with the SC Zeus Data Center team of seasoned professionals and provide our institutional investor base with additional exposure to this sector.”
One-Stop Shop
SC Zeus is positioned as a one-stop solution serving the various real estate strategies managed by SC Capital, offering design, investment management, asset management, leasing, sales, project management, operations and technical services for data centres across APAC.
Former Rockworth Capital and Digital Realty exec Joe Gooi leads the new venture
The platform’s website indicates that the project pipeline includes facilities in Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand, in addition to South Korea. SC Zeus plans to power all its data centres with 100 percent renewable energy.
Gooi joined SC Zeus in early 2021 after most recently spending two years as managing director for capital markets and strategy at Singapore-based Rockworth Capital Partners.
His previous roles include head of APAC investment and asset management at Generali Real Estate and head of APAC portfolio management at Digital Realty, the world’s largest data centre trust.
“We are excited to launch this platform with SC Capital Partners,” Gooi said. “We see a stark increase in appetite from institutional investors for the data centre sector in the Asia Pacific region, and with our pan-Asian team and vertically integrated approach, we believe we are well-positioned to capitalise on the various opportunities.”
The data centre startup’s executive team also includes former Chayora technical director AC Lee as COO and Wang Peng, a former senior vice president with Blackstone-backed 21Vianet (now VNet), as senior vice president.
Joining the Race
SC Capital’s new venture is the latest Singapore-based entrant into a data centre race that has attracted institutional investors from around the globe.
Princeton Digital Group announced in February that it had secured $505 million in fresh cash to expand its regional data centre platform, with the Warburg Pincus-backed firm closing on a new financing round led by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company with a $350 million commitment.
In January, Keppel Corp announced that it had reached a $1.1 billion final closing on its second data centre fund, which targets investments in Asia and Europe. That same month, logistics specialist GLP was reported to be evaluating opportunities to raise $500 million for investment in expanding its set of mainland China data centres.
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