Bridge Data Centres CIO Sees Scale as Key Competitive Advantage: MTD TV

Asia Pacific’s digital infrastructure race favours platforms with scale, access to capital and a track record of delivering stabilised projects, according to the chief investment officer of Bridge Data Centres. Watch the full recording>>

Bridge develops and operates hyperscale facilities in India, Malaysia and Thailand and aims to surpass 600 megawatts of contracted capacity by year-end, Kevin Guan said Wednesday in an interview as part of Mingtiandi’s 2025 APAC Data Centre Forum. The Bain Capital-backed platform also hopes to add “two or three more” countries to its portfolio in the months ahead, Guan told MTD TV viewers during the forum, which is sponsored by Yardi.

Rather than working with dozens of small suppliers across Asia, Europe and the US, hyperscale clients prefer a handful of large, trustworthy platforms to provide data centres capable of keeping pace with evolving technologies, according to Guan.

“Certainly it’s going to be survival of the strongest, fittest and the largest in this hyperscale data centre game that we have as we look forward to the next couple years,” he said.

Network Expansion Ahead

In March, Bridge secured $2.8 billion in bank financing to expand its network in the region, and Guan said Wednesday that the platform will use some of the debt capital to extend beyond its “home market” of Southeast Asia.

“As part of my role at Bridge so far this year, we’ve been planting seeds in newer geographies,” he said. “Now we have quite a few partners that we’re building relationships with in Japan, in Korea, in Australia, and these partners have helped us create a pipeline of asset-level opportunities.”

With fellow Bain portfolio company WinTrix having agreed last week to sell its China data centre business for nearly $4 billion — and Bridge’s in-service capacity on track to reach 400MW by the end of 2025 — an increasing number of stabilised assets are becoming investable.

“We’re entering that new phase of what do we do with the stabilised assets,” Guan said. “Many people are exploring many different things. And we’re hoping that overall this becomes more viable, actually multiple paths to get asset recycling, therefore that’s going to make investments into the space more attractive overall.”

East Asia in Focus

The Data Centre Forum continues Thursday with a panel discussion on the Japan and Korea markets as MTD TV welcomes Yasuo Suzuki, executive vice president and managing director for APAC at NTT Global Data Centres; Phillipa Weber, executive director for asset management at Goldman Sachs; Dae Hyun Choi, head of Asia investments at DCI Data Centres; and Jingwen Ong, APAC research manager at DC Byte.

The four will examine how booming digital economies and rising demand for server facilities in the key East Asia markets are attracting large-scale investments and new platforms.

The forum concludes Friday with a spotlight interview featuring Rangu Salgame of Princeton Digital Group. Salgame, who co-founded the Singapore-based company with Warburg Pincus in 2017, returns to MTD TV after PDG closed on a $1.3 billion investment from Stonepeak last month and will share what comes next for one of Asia’s largest data centre platforms.