Megawide to build data centers

Megawide Construction Corp. is set to make its foray into data centers, a sector that has been recently gaining traction due to rising demand for hyperscalers.

Jaime Raphael Feliciano, chief business development officer at Megawide, told reporters last week that they had already signed the preliminary documents for this venture with a foreign partner.

The details of the project, including the capacity, location and potential clients, were not disclosed yet, as Feliciano said they were bound by confidentiality agreement for now.

He said that building digital infrastructures, such as the data centers, was a project they had looked at since last year.

“It is the future. It is still infrastructure, which is our core expertise,” he said. “We see that there’s a gap in terms of serving the needs of certain clients, hyperscalers included.”

A data center is a facility that stores critical applications and data, according to tech giant Cisco. A hyperscaler data center provides a much larger computing environment, like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM and Oracle.

“The trajectory seems to be that supply will be necessary to keep up with the demand, which, as we’ve seen, is steadily ramping up,” he added.

There have been moves to increase data center capacity in the country, including Globe Telecom’s joint venture deal with Singapore-based ST Telemedia Global Data Centers and Ayala Corp. The Ayala-led firm said it could beef up its data capacity by up to 100 megawatts (MW) from the current 30 MW.

PLDT Inc. earlier this year broke ground for VITRO Sta. Rosa, its 11th and biggest data center, which is designed to have a total capacity of up to 100 MW.

Converge ICT Solutions Inc. is currently building a P1-billion data center in Cebu which has about 300 racks. It is set to open by the third quarter of 2024.

According to real property expert Knight Santos Frank, the data center capacity in the country was projected to grow to 220 MW from the current 94 MW, based on existing and potential projects.

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