PHOTO
Emirati billionaire Husain Sajwani will invest $1 billion to develop data centres in different locations around the world.
The facilities, to be established through Sajwani's new data centre business Edgnex, will target major tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
"We're going to build data centres in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We want to build a global company, and we're allocating a billion dollars for that business," the founder of Dubai-based property firm DAMAC, told CNBC on Wednesday.
Last year, DAMAC Group launched its own digital infrastructure company, Edgnex, "with the aim to support growth of digital economies" worldwide.
The company has also partnered with Ireland-based Dataplex Group Limited, a data centre co-location, engineering and construction solutions company, to develop data centre facilities in Europe.
The data centres will be leased out to tech companies for using them in emerging or underserved markets.
"We're not going to build the racks, we're leasing the space," said Sajwani.
"The next step is co-location. If we build 20 megawatts, a hyperscaler can take 15, and the other five we can lease to banks and large institutions," he added.
Data consumption has surged in recent times, mainly driven by remote work, online shopping and cloud computing.
The trend has sparked a boom in data centre development, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, according to real estate services firm JLL.
"The heightened need for data centres can be attributed in part to the pandemic, which fueled the rise of e-commerce, remote work and cloud computing - all of which transmit large amounts of data through a data centre," JLL said.
(Reporting by Cleofe Maceda; editing by Seban Scaria)
