PLDT unit builds up AI-ready data centers

Vitro Sta. Rosa (VSR) will be the first AI-ready hyperscale data center in the Philippines.

The data center arm of PLDT Group is banking on artificial intelligence (AI) to drive its growth in the coming year, equipping its facilities with higher computing power to support digital-savvy enterprise clients.

Victor Genuino, president and CEO of ePLDT Inc. and its unit VITRO Inc., said they were the first local data center operator to have the capability in handling AI workloads.

“AI-readiness is our key priority in 2025 as we provide both our public and private sector customers access to high-performance computing using our AI-ready data center infrastructure,” he said.

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Gary Ignacio, VITRO Inc. chief commercial officer, said their 11th data center—VITRO Sta. Rosa—has now data cabinets that can power up to 17 kilowatts (kW), which is the minimum requirement to support an AI workload. A data cabinet stores hardware like servers, routers and modems.

Ignacio said that this increased capacity was more than the usual requirement of only 3 kW to 5 kW per cabinet.

Moving forward, Ignacio said they would ramp up the cabinet capacity to 50 kW in order to facilitate more data volume given the increasing digitalization among enterprises.

Among the AI use cases for VITRO clients are fraud detection, medical imaging, automation and cybersecurity.

“We’re expecting to get traditional retail colocation requirements from enterprise customers. We’re definitely expecting a wave of hyperscaler demand to continue to come in,” Ignacio added.

Hyperscalers are entities that provide cloud, networking and internet services the likes of which include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba AliCloud, IBM and Oracle.

Last July, PLDT activated VITRO Sta. Rosa, which has 50 megawatts in total capacity. INQ