D A T A C E N T R E S H O W C A S E

Digital Realty has footprints across Asia Pacific – how are you prioritising where to build next?

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.

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.

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.

In terms of emerging markets – Southeast Asia, India – 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.

Can you outline some of the community engagement activities Digital Realty has conducted across the US and Asia Pacific?

SERENE NAH

MANAGING DIRECTOR AND HEAD OF ASIA PACIFIC, DIGITAL REALTY

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.

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’ s Women’ s Leadership Forum( WLF) in Asia Pacific.

She has a Bachelor of Business from Nanyang Technological University and an Executive MBA from Kellogg-HKUST.

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 – 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 – generating better awareness and developing skill sets needed to support career growth.

With AI demand and cloud computing scaling rapidly across Asia, where do you see the data centre market heading in the future?

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. �

As a growing industry – slightly more mature in the US, newer in Asia Pacific – it makes appealing to new talent challenging. Training people takes time which poses a challenge alongside the rate of technology evolution – 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. We ' ve started tertiary education partnerships in both the US and Singapore and we ' re rolling that out to Jakarta and soon Malaysia.

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