Australian property group Lendlease had entered $1 billion joint venture to create data centers across the Asia Pacific region. This happened after more than 20 years working in the data space industry, according to APAC Real Estate.
The announcement was first released in June, where Lendlease and a yet-to-be-named institutional investor joined together to create a collection of different data facilities in Asia Pacific countries. Some of these centers are set to be built in Australia, China, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Data centers house more than just computer servers. They are also repositories for other IT hardware and act as storage and processors for a huge amount of data, whether it's used for social media or e-commerce.
Data has played a huge part in many people's lives today and shows no signs of slowing down, with innovations like cloud computing making it more popular than ever. Video and music streaming as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) added to the popularity of and heavy reliance on data.
Internet users in the ASEAN region also rose by 10% year-on-year from the year 2016 to 2018, while active mobile social media users rose by 27% year-on-year, based on data gathered from Hootsuite and We Are Social.
Lendlease's action follows their partnership with the University of Melbourne and Monash University for a $28 million effort in hosting a smart construction Cooperative Research Center, according to IT News. Building 4.0 CRC wants to utilize digital solutions in introducing innovations and efficiency into the building industry. The company is also working with construction tech firm Donovan Group.
Research into the CRC revealed that the building industry came together at the best of times, according to Monash University professor Mathew Aitchison, the interim CEO of Building 4.0 CRC. When they came together, it would always result in delivering changes for efficiency, affordability, and sustainability of buildings. All these happened while the builders maintained the same level of quality.
This improvement can be used in Lendlease's improvements to creating data centers in Asia.
It's especially helpful that they can use data science and artificial intelligence, combined with robotics, to deliver the improvements in data centers and other buildings through their improvement of development and design through production.
Lendlease's entry into Asia comes at a time when the data center market is vibrant. The market saw the likes of Facebook and Google committing to a data center in Singapore, worth $1 billion and $350 million, respectively.
