Equinix and Alibaba Cloud focus on Asia Pacific in latest data centre launches

The race for cloud supremacy in the emerging Asia Pacific regions continues apace, with new data centre launches planned for Singapore and Indonesia by Equinix and Alibaba Cloud respectively. Equinix announced that $85 million had been invested in a seven-storey site called SG4, which is expected to open its doors in the fourth quarter of 2019 with 1,400 cabinets available in the first instance. The site’s name reflects the fact that this will be Equinix’s fourth data centre in the city-state, with SG4 being built on the east side of the island, marking it out from the other sites.The company trumpeted that the move will “provide interconnection and premium data centre services to help businesses with their IT transformation and cloud adoption initiatives, while also supporting the digital infrastructure of Singapore. Meanwhile, Alibaba announced the launch of a second data centre facility in Indonesia, bolstering its strength in the country. The move, which Alibaba claims was driven by ‘strong’ customer demand, will aim to give customers greater disaster recovery capabilities and critical switchover.