According to a report by property consultancy Cushman & Wakefield, Singapore has emerged as the third most robust data centre market worldwide in a global ranking of 38 countries. As per the report, it is also the only mature data centre market in all of South-east Asia.
The Cushman & Wakefield Data Centre Competitiveness Index took into account factors such as connectivity, ease of doing business, political stability, corporate tax rate, natural disasters, energy and security which are likely to affect the successful operation of a data centre. Countries and cities were then assigned scores based on the weightage allocated to each of these factors.
Singapore jumped four spots from its ranking in 2017, and retained its top position in the Asia-Pacific region with the rise largely due to improved high-speed connectivity, political stability, and low risk of natural disasters relative to other countries.
"Being sheltered from natural disasters and robust infrastructure, many content operators continue to take advantage of Singapore's prime geographical location to service their regional clients in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand," the report stated.
Singapore has also attracted a number of top tech companies to set up data centres, a prime example being Facebook, which has said that it is planning to invest over USD 1 billion to build a data centre in Singapore, by 2022.
Other major companies like Equinix, Digital Realty, and ST Telemedia also have plans to establish data centres in the island nation.
North America is currently the largest co-location data centre by market size at USD 17.2 billion, but the Asia-Pacific region is expected to take over as early as 2021.
Cushman & Wakefield projects that the South-east Asia region, including Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, will be the fastest-growing region for co-location data centres over the next five years, spurred by rapid digitisation and an increased demand for cloud-based services.
"The progressive rollout of 5G networks across the world is expected to fuel demand for data centres… In Asia-Pacific, Singapore is one of the early adopters of 5G, and is on track to roll out 5G mobile networks by 2020," said the report.