KUALA LUMPUR Singapore’s Princeton Digital Group plans to double the capacity of its data centres in three years to meet surging demand from global artificial intelligence developers, highlighting tech firms’ rising interest in Asia.

The Warburg Pincus-backed company is adding more than 300 employees in markets including Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and India by the end of 2025 as AI propels its growth, Rangu Salgame, PDG’s chairman and CEO, said in an interview.

PDG is among the data centre operators capitalising on global tech’s push to expand in fast-growing regions such as India and Southeast Asia. The company has built capacity requiring one gigawatt of energy in the past six years and the ballooning demand for AI data centres from Mumbai to Singapore means its capacity is now set to double in about half the time, Salgame said.

“Now with the AI speed, probably we will have one gigawatt in at least half the time, which is in three years - maybe sooner,” he said.

PDG, which also counts Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Co as investors, has data centres in several countries, including the major markets of India and China. It started to operate the first phase of a 150-megawatt data centre in Johor, Malaysia, in early July after securing a US$280 million green loan to finance the US$1.5 billion project.

The world invested close to US$22 billion to build data centres in the first five months of this year, reflecting the increasingly critical role that the facilities play in supporting the expanding digital economy, according to a Linklaters report.

“We are talking about 70% to 200% growth in capacity over the next few years,” Salgame said. “That means we will be building a lot more than we’d thought two years ago, and that’s across all the markets - Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and India.”

  - Bloomberg