Singapore-based Evolution Data Centres (EDC) is setting up a joint venture with private equity major Warburg Pincus to develop hyper-scale data centres in Southeast Asia, according to an announcement.
The investment will be made through Warburg Pincus’s maiden Asia real estate fund, which was closed last year at $2.8 billion.
Founded in 2021, EDC said it has deployed more than 640MW of capacity and led more than $1 billion of digital infrastructure transactions in the region.
The company was established to address the lack of quality and scale of data centre capacity in emerging Asian markets, it said.
Warburg Pincus has invested over $7.5 billion in more than 50 real estate ventures in Asia. Its inaugural Asia real estate fund is focused on the new-economy real estate assets.
Earlier this year, the firm backed JD Property’s Series B round as a return investor. It has also recently invested in Vietnamese real estate developer Novaland.
Warburg Pincus was a shareholder in Hong Kong-based ESR, the largest Asia Pacific-focused logistics real estate platform, which it exited earlier last year.
In Southeast Asia, Warburg Pincus has committed nearly $3.5 billion to 17 companies since 2013, including MoMo, GoTo, GCash, Advance, BW Industrial, Techcombank and Converge, among others.
The data centre space in Southeast Asia is seeing an uptick in deals and investments. Last month, Google announced the launch of its third data centre in Singapore. In July, ESR raised over $1 billion for its first data centre investment vehicle, while its subsidiary LOGOS is also targeting to raise more than $800 million for a green data centre venture.
Earlier in 2021, Singapore-based Digital Edge, a platform backed by US infrastructure and real estate manager Stonepeak, acquired a controlling stake in Indonesian digital infrastructure service provider Indonet for $165 million.