Vantage Data Centers secures $64M to fund first data center in Taiwan

Vantage Data Centers has secured a $64 million loan to fund its first data center in Taiwan, which is currently under development and is expected to open in mid-2024.

The loan, valued at approximately 2 billion Taiwanese dollars in local currency, came from CTBC Bank and Cathay United Bank and marks the first hyperscale data center financing transaction for a data center operator in the island nation.

"Vantage is proud to lead the way in marking the first financing of a greenfield data center project in Taiwan," said Joel Cheah, Vantage's CFO in the Asia-Pacific region. "We appreciate CTBC Bank's continued confidence in Vantage's data center platform and are pleased to have the Cathay United Bank team join us in this innovative financial milestone in the next phase of Taiwan's growth as a regional data center market."

Dubbed TPE11, the data center campus will deliver 16MW of IT capacity across a 20,000sqm facility located 35 minutes from the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. It is Vantage's eighth campus in Asia-Pacific as it continues to expand its footprint in the region.

Once completed, Vantage Data Centers said the campus will serve hyperscalers, cloud providers and large enterprises as the region becomes a major digital infrastructure hub.

Related:Vantage Data Centers expands into Taiwan with a 16MW data center

Accelerated expansion roadmap

In the past year, Vantage raised $10 billion capital through incremental debt and equity financing to support the growing demand from the world's largest hyperscalers.

This influx of capital came as demand for hyperscale cloud services and generative AI soared, with projections expected to reach $535 billion by 2028, according to Structure Research, and $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, respectively.

"In 2023, we entered emerging and high-demand data center markets to meet the needs of our customers as artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies continue to advance," said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO of Vantage Data Centers. "By aligning our strategic roadmap with our customers' needs and forging partnerships with leading international investors, we continued our rapid growth in 2023, and we will continue to build on this momentum in 2024 and beyond."

In 2023, Vantage said it more than tripled the previous year's investments, enabling the company to ramp up plans to deliver even more capacity for customers. It entered the London and Taipei markets, in addition to breaking ground on seven campuses across North America, EMEA and APAC, and opening ten new data centers globally.

Besides its first data center in Taiwan, Vantage's investment in Asia-Pacific includes the building of a second data center campus (KUL2) in Cyberjaya with an additional planned US$3 billion (RM13.32 billion) investment. Upon completion, the KUL2 campus will deliver 256MW of IT capacity to meet the growing customer demand for hyperscale data center services.

"Entering 2024, Vantage is poised for strong performance, starting the year with 32 campuses spanning five continents, 13 countries and 19 markets with IT capacity that will surpass 2GW once all campuses are fully developed," said Choksi.