Rather than competing in isolation, markets across Asia Pacific will increasingly play complementary roles based on connectivity, regulation, infrastructure-readiness and customer demand. Digital Realty’s own footprint is starting to mirror that logic, particularly with the launch of its Malaysia platform in June, anchored in Cyberjaya and integrated into PlatformDIGITAL\u00ae and ServiceFabric\u00ae, its global interconnection and orchestration platform. The move extends the company’s Southeast Asia presence alongside Singapore and Jakarta, tying one of the region’s fastest-growing digital markets into a single connected infrastructure layer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Infrastructure quality will define the next phase of AI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As organisations move AI into production, trusted, resilient and highly connected infrastructure becomes essential for delivering performance, governance and long-term scalability. That’s what makes Digital Realty’s nearly S$7 billion investment target in Singapore significant beyond its size \u2013 pairing more than S$4.3 billion in new data centre development with workforce growth towards 400 employees by 2030 and a new Innovation Lab which will be opening in the second half of this year, positioning the country as the region’s hub for enterprise AI moving from pilot to production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Digital Realty is enabling the next phase of AI across Asia Pacific<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Japan tells a similar story at the infrastructure level. The recent opening of NRT14, the third facility at Digital Realty’s Inzai City campus, brings a high-power, high-density environment built specifically for next-generation GPUs, with hybrid liquid and air cooling capable of supporting workloads up to 150kW per rack. It’s one of the first facilities in the country to achieve DGX-Ready certification \u2013 a concrete answer to the rapidly diversifying demand for AI infrastructure across the Tokyo metropolitan area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Together, these developments show a company scaling deliberately rather than opportunistically; expanding where connectivity and readiness already exist, investing ahead of demand in strategic hubs and building the physical infrastructure that production-scale AI requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific, Digital Realty, has expertise in finance, mergers and acquisitions and business transformation from her previous roles at General Electric, Silverlake Partners and most recently as Executive Director and CFO at Kerry Properties where she led finance, corporate development, strategy and operations.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Digital Realty has footprints across Asia Pacific \u2013 how are you prioritising where to build next?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We focus on three foundational pillars. First is ensuring we’re extending our global footprint so we can build on the technology platform layer as part of the entire infrastructure network. We provide a solid infrastructure that’s operationally ready, high quality and resilient for our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second is being relevant to our customers. Many people think of us as only serving hyperscale customers, but we have a lot of enterprise customers, connectivity partners and resellers as well as partnership relationships. We can sell anything from one cabinet to single-digit megawatts, to even double- and triple-digit megawatts. As a result, we want to make sure we’re catering to all the different product forms, with a technology layer underpinning our customers’ needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, we focus on countries and footprints where we can cater to what’s prevailing in the market and what demand and supply looks like. If a market is currently more suited to a hyperscale footprint or an emerging AI footprint, we want to understand that demand and supply, identify the segments we can serve well and that becomes our key focus. Our core markets are Singapore, Japan, Australia and now Korea, and we aim to double our capacity. We have high demand from customers in those markets, from connectivity-rich offerings to multi-megawatt offerings for enterprises to largescale footprints and more recently we’ve started to see private AI emerge there too. We want to have the right, future-proof inventory for that expected demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of emerging markets \u2013 Southeast Asia, India \u2013 we must make sure that as we enter, we focus on building connectivityrich buildings or inventory and then connect that into the different product classes required. In some of these markets there may be more cloud-driven workloads and early connectivity access points, so we’re building out the right infrastructure and connectivity layer for the right enterprise customers in those emerging markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can you outline some of the community engagement activities Digital Realty has conducted across the US and Asia Pacific?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As a growing industry \u2013 slightly more mature in the US, newer in Asia Pacific \u2013 it makes appealing to new talent challenging. Training people takes time which poses a challenge alongside the rate of technology evolution \u2013 from the time we start designing and building, to construction and operations, the underlying requirements for cooling and densities have changed. Our customers and vendors are experiencing the same and as a result, we’re seeing unprecedented demand for training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ve started tertiary education partnerships in both the US and Singapore and we’re rolling that out to Jakarta and soon Malaysia. We want to partner at the tertiary level, so students understand what a data centre requires, its role and what a typical day involves. In Asia Pacific, we’ve engaged with tertiary institutions, brought them on site tours and ran workshops \u2013 most recently we partnered with a school in Indonesia. We invested time explaining how AI has transformed in the last three years and how to support the AI infrastructure being built \u2013 generating better awareness and developing skill sets needed to support career growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With AI demand and cloud computing scaling rapidly across Asia, where do you see the data centre market heading in the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Demand continues to grow tremendously and exponentially. In Asia Pacific especially, we’re still in the early innings but we’ve seen tremendous growth in the US and Europe and predict the same for Asia Pacific. <\/p>\n\n\n\nDigital Realty expert elaborates on the company’s AI-driven growth across APAC <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Alongside her current role, she chairs the board of Digital Core REIT and serves as Vice Chair of the Asia Pacific Data Center Association (APDCA), leading regional dialogue on data centre policy. Nah is a strong supporter of DEI and is executive sponsor of Digital Realty\u2019s Women\u2019s Leadership Forum (WLF) in Asia Pacific.<\/em> She has a Bachelor of Business from Nanyang Technological University and an Executive MBA from Kellogg-HKUST.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n