NTT, Digital Realty, Baker Mac Look at Rapid Rise of Southeast Asia Data Centres: MTD TV

Billions of dollars in commitments from global hyperscalers and surging AI and cloud demand have combined to make Southeast Asia the region’s hottest digital infrastructure market this year, according to speakers from NTT, Digital Realty and Baker McKenzie at Mingtiandi’s 2025 APAC Data Centre Forum on Tuesday.

With data centre platforms having announced more than 24 gigawatts of new projects in Southeast Asia last year, according to DC Byte, the emerging hotspots of Malaysia and Thailand continue to draw interest in 2025 as hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Microsoft ramp up bets, the guests told MTD TV viewers during the forum, which is sponsored by Yardi.

The subregion is profiting from its unique position as a hyperscale market open to American and Chinese tech giants in equal measure, said Yasuo Suzuki, executive vice president for APAC at Japan’s NTT Global Data Centres, one of the biggest providers of server sheds in Asia.

“For example, if you look at the US, US hyperscalers would be dominant, and even in India, Australia, US hyperscalers would be dominant,” Suzuki told MTD TV. “But if you look at Southeast Asian countries, both US hyperscalers and Chinese hyperscalers would have almost similar presence.”

Macro Pull Factors

In addition to offering an alternative to supply-constrained Singapore, emerging Southeast Asia has its own merits to tempt hyperscalers, said Woon Teng Koh, senior director for acquisitions at US-based Digital Realty, the second-largest data centre player globally.

“It’s one of the fastest-growing regions for digital infrastructure worldwide,” Koh said. “And there are a lot of very attractive macro factors such as rising internet penetration, a growing young middle-class population that’s expected to continue growing, rapid cloud adoption, governments providing policy support to make infrastructure investments easier. So all these, along with the Singapore capacity constraints, make Southeast Asia a very attractive market to us.”

With NTT having raised $773 million this year from Singapore’s largest REIT IPO in over a decade and Digital Realty sponsoring its own SGX-listed Digital Core REIT, publicly traded trusts are enabling platforms to turn stabilised assets into cash while broadening the investment base of the traditionally closed private market for data centres, said Hong Kong-based Baker McKenzie partner Robert Wright.

“REITs also provide a great platform for transparency, standardised reporting, trading, liquidity and all the features that make the sector easier to analyse and benchmark if you are assessing the market,” Wright told MTD TV. “And it also helps to just generally create this cycle of confidence in the sector, whether you’re an investor at an earlier stage to give you another liquidation event or, at a later stage, to participate in the market.”

Bridge Investment Boss Next

The Data Centre Forum continues Wednesday with a spotlight interview featuring Kevin Guan, chief investment officer and executive vice president for new business and capital markets at Bridge Data Centres. Guan will discuss what comes next for Bain Capital-backed Bridge after Bain last week agreed to sell its China data centre business for nearly $4 billion.

On Thursday, the forum presents a panel 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 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 his company 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.