PH data center space seen attracting more investments

MANILA  -More investments in the data center space are seen to flow into the country amid the great demand from hyperscalers looking for the next data hub at a time of heightened digitalization, according to information technology infrastructure company Kyndryl.

Wilson Go, Kyndryl Philippines managing director, said in a briefing in Makati on Tuesday that hyperscalers were keen on establishing footprint in the country.

“In terms of the location of data centers here, it is a natural evolution where they come to other countries and now they’ve saturated … and start looking at options,” he said.

Hyperscalers are entities providing cloud, networking and internet services.  These include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM and Oracle.

Investments in data centers have been ramping up in the country to meet the growing demand. Telecommunications and other technology companies have been putting up facilities recently.

Just last month, the Ayala Group and joint venture partner Singapore-based ST Telemedia Global Data Centers broke ground for $1-billion data center in Fairview, Quezon City with a capacity of 124 megawatts.

“As far the hyperscalers are considered, this is all for the response in terms of the demand in the marketplace in terms of point of presence because customers want to be able to connect locally instead of connecting outside,” Go said.

“And the other one is data residency because there is also a demand that the data reside in the Philippines rather than it sitting outside,” he explained.

The demand is also seen to be boosted by demand for cloud services from various sectors such as financial services and healthcare, said Susan Follis, managing director at Kyndryl Asean.

“The pandemic accelerated digital healthcare adoption across Asean, such as the adoption of telemedicine over large physical distances and also amplified long-standing issues such as the lack of medical professionals,” Follis said.

However, Kyndryl global cloud practice leader Harish Grama noted there was a shortage of in-house IT employees, noting that nearly half of the organizations stressed the need for hiring experts.