BANGALORE (Sept 19): Data centre operator Princeton Digital Group (PDG) bought land in India, Malaysia and Indonesia and secured power supply for the sites to boost its capacity by nearly 50%, seeking to capitalise on rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) services.

The buildout is part of a US$5 billion (RM21.34 billion) investment programme 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 centre 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 US$1 billion, Bloomberg reported this week. The Singapore-based company said in July it plans to double the capacity of its data centres 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 centre 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 centre capacity,” the CEO said in a statement.

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