Hyderabad-based CtrlS forays into Southeast Asia, partners with Thailand's EECO

Hyderabad-headquartered CtrlS Datacenters on Monday has signed a memorandum of agreement (MoA) with eastern economic corridor office (EECO) of Thailand, a public agency aiming to encourage investment, innovation, and advanced technology in the country. This marks CtrlS’ first international market expansion as well as its first hyperscale datacenter in Thailand.

As per the agreement, CtrlS will lease a 10-acre (25-rai) land parcel for 50 years located at Chonburi Province of Thailand.  The land will be used to build a 150 MW datacenter greenfield datacenter campus, the company said in a statement. 

 In January the company said that it is looking to triple its number of data centres from eight to about 25 by 2024-25 and also plans to expand globally, by eyeing into Southeast Asia and the Middle East markets.

At a time when the digitalization across Thailand, deployment of 5G, and improved connectivity with highly efficient submarine cables with countries such as USA, China, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan is making the country an attractive hub for digital infrastructure, the datacenter development in the Eastern Economic Corridor will attract both international and domestic hyperscale and enterprise customers, the company added.

“Through this collaboration, we aim to serve customers’ needs for digital services, both domestic and international. The datacenter is designed to meet hyperscalers’ needs in addition to serving high-end IT/compute needs of domestic enterprises,” Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Chairman, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, said in a statement.

For example, the datacenter site at EEC offers proximity to submarine cable landing stations for AAG (Asia-America Gateway) and ADC (Asia Direct Cable) systems, making this datacenter a point of connection equipped with submarine and terrestrial cable networks to connect to other datacenters and industrial estates.

It is also close to the EEC startup incubator and is elevated relative to flood prone areas. The Eastern Corridor is geographically diverse from Bangkok, and is at the intersection of multiple fiber paths north and south.

Chula Sukmanop, Secretary-General of the Eastern Economic Corridor Office (EECO) of Thailand, said that this “investment of CtrlS in EECO could lead to several valued collaborations in the future to come, to the organization, communities, Thailand and the world”.

CtrlS which began operations in 2007, today operates over one million square feet of data centre space in India, spread across eight data centres located in core technology hubs such as Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Pinnapureddy said the company’s presence in the EEC region will not only bring new investments, but also new jobs to the local community in Thailand.

Meanwhile, a report published April 2023 by global commercial real estate services JLL said that the global colocation data center market is projected to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.3% from 2021-2026, while the hyperscale market is expected to grow even faster, at approximately a 20% CAGR.