One of Singapore’s best-funded startups is ‘hyperscaling’ Asia Pacific’s data centers

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Data centers in the Asia Pacific are a booming market. The rise of large public cloud providers the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud enables businesses to easily build complex software without maintaining expensive hardware in-house.

Data centers are vital to this. Essentially large warehouses filled with servers, they are the bones that keep cloud computing upright. But online services are surging in demand and in bandwidth as more challenging use cases appear, such as processing power-hungry AI applications or cryptography functions.

So more data centers are needed to prop them up. Large companies like Amazon and Google have their own, but those aren’t enough to support their services everywhere. That’s where the opportunity for third-party hyperscale data center operators comes in.

AirTrunk, one of Singapore’s best-funded startups, is a hyperscale data center builder and operator. With a private equity fundraise of US$313 million from Goldman Sachs and TPG Capital, it came in third after Grab and Sea in the biggest disclosed funding rounds of 2017.

“Our customers, who are public cloud providers, are basically doubling their infrastructure every six to 12 months. Typically, our competitors take a long time to build new infrastructure, whereas we built two of the largest data centers in Asia Pacific in less than a year,” AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda tells Tech in Asia.

Hyperscale accommodates increased demand for data centers by using a single computer architecture that can be scaled quickly and easily by bringing more machines online as needed. The new machines are added to the existing system to massively boost its overall storage space or processing power. The difference with traditional data centers is the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the system. Such facilities generally require a lot of space, occupying at least 1,000 square meters and more.

According to a report by consultancy firm Linesight, hyperscale-type facilities with capacity of 60 to 100 megawatts (MW) will comprise more than half of data centers worldwide by 2020. For comparison, most traditional data center facilities in Singapore and Australia have capacities of 12 to 20 MW. Linesight expects Asia Pacific’s data center capacity to surpass Europe’s by the same year.

Hyperscale-type facilities with capacity of 60 to 100 MW will comprise more than half of data centers worldwide by 2020.

Meanwhile, according to research firm Synergy, only a fraction of the world’s hyperscale data centers exist in Asia. Of the 400 such facilities around the world at the moment, 44 percent is in the US and the rest are distributed across other countries.

Khuda has a background in telcos and data center companies in Australia like Singtel Optus and NextDC. He set up AirTrunk in 2014 in Singapore because he saw the growing demand for online services and the infrastructure needed to support them in the Asia-Pacific region.

The startup competes with large data operators like Equinix and NTT, but it’s betting on its hyperscale infrastructure and its focus on serving public cloud providers to make its mark. To make that happen, AirTrunk has attracted experienced talent from companies like Amazon, Alibaba, and data center providers Equinix and Digital Realty.

AirTrunk’s data center in Sydney has 25,000 square meters reserved for its data halls. Photo credit: AirTrunk

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