Technology

Warburg-Backed PDG Buys Land Across Asia to Serve AI Demand

Ethernet cables in a supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in San Diego, California, U.S., on Monday, March 1, 2021. MIT researchers are using the 'Comet' supercomputer to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to detect electron correlation, which is vital but expensive to calculate in quantum chemistry. Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg (Bing Guan/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Data center operator Princeton Digital Group bought land in India, Malaysia and Indonesia and secured power supply for the sites to boost its capacity by nearly 50%, seeking to capitalize on rising demand for artificial intelligence services.

The buildout is part of a $5 billion investment program and will happen in the next 12 to 18 months, Chief Executive Officer Rangu Salgame said in an interview. It’ll boost Warburg Pincus-backed PDG’s capacity by 500 megawatts.

The company is adding capacity in high-demand hotspots in Johor in Malaysia, just across the Singapore border, Jakarta as well as India’s Mumbai and Chennai. In these markets, the data center provider already caters to global technology companies, which are expanding across Asia to tap increasing demand for cloud and AI services.

PDG is considering a private fundraising round to raise as much as $1 billion, Bloomberg reported this week. The Singapore-based company said in July it plans to double the capacity of its data centers in three years to meet surging demand from AI developers and to add more than 300 employees in markets including Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and India by the end of 2025.

AI has transformed the data center landscape in the past 18 months, said Salgame, with demand first rising in North America followed by Asia. “By securing access and road map to full power in these locations, we continue to be positioned to meet the Pan Asia customer demand for scalable, AI-ready data center capacity,” the CEO said in a statement.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.

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