Data Centre Investment Experts to Lead Tuesday Event: MTD TV MTD TV APAC Data Centre Forum 2021

Data centre investment veterans from Princeton Digital Group, Nuveen, JLL and US law firm Greenberg Traurig will be sharing insights on Asia’s hottest real estate investment sector this coming Tuesday on MTD TV.

The one-hour discussion will focus on the opportunities and growing pains facing data centre operators and the investors who back them as what was once a niche sector attracted $2.2 billion in investment across Asia Pacific alone during 2020, according to independent statistics.

The panel, which is sponsored by Yardi, is the second session in Mingtiandi’s APAC Data Centre Forum 2021, which is scheduled to continue through 23 September and started earlier this week with a spotlight interview with Princeton Digital chairman and chief executive Rangu Salgame.

Overcoming Bottlenecks

Last year’s $2.2 billion in data centre investment in Asia Pacific was a 38 percent increase over the $1.4 billion spent on the sector in 2018, which was the previous high water mark, and a more than ten-fold increase over the 2016 total.

With that increase in deal volume, investors are finding growing competition for stabilised assets and development sites, as well as having to come to grips with regulatory frameworks and sustainability concerns.

To better understand how this affects operations within the industry, Mingtiandi will be welcoming Princeton Digital, co-founder and chief operating officer, Varoon Raghavan; Nuveen senior director for alternatives and strategic transactions, Jing Zhou; Bob Tan, an executive director with the data centre practice group with JLL’s capital markets team and Joel H Rothstein, shareholder and chair of the Asia real estate practice with Greenberg Traurig.

With Nuveen’s Zhou having spent six years at Digital Realty, as well as working in consulting before joining Nuveen this year, and Raghavan having more than 15 years experience in telecom infrastructure, the panel features two experience infrastructure executive.

Tan and Rothstein, with decades of experience in advisory roles in the region, will provide insights from their track records guiding some of the largest data centre transactions in the region.

MTD TV Pipeline

Following Tuesday’s investment panel, the data centre forum will continue on Thursday, 9 September with a spotlight interview with Braham Singh, chief executive of Hong Kong-based BDx Data Centres.

Singh, who heads the regional startup, will be quizzed on his experiences leading one of the region’s top providers of co-location services, as it stretches beyond its roots in Greater China into Southeast Asia and India.

The event series will continue the following week on 14 September, with a panel dedicated to sustainable data centre solutions.

With keeping green among the biggest challenges for data centre operators and investors, the panel will include PDG executive vice president Chris Street, BDx chief operating officer Jeremy Yew, and JLL senior director Andrew Green.

On 23 September, the final session in the Asia Data Centre Forum 2021 will focus on the region’s largest market – the North Asia region. That discussion of opportunities in Greater China, Korea and Japan will feature BDx vice president and CEO for Greater China Bill Gao and Thomas Liu, a partner with Actis who has led the UK fund manager’s data centre investments in Greater China and Korea. Two more participants in the North Asia show will be named in the coming days.