YTL buys Singaporean startup Dodid to get its first data center outside of Malaysia

In a press release from YTL today, the Malaysian conglomerate has announced a deal between YTL Power International Berhad, through its subsidiary YTL Data Center Holdings, and Singaporean startup Dodid Pte Ltd, with the former completing an acquisition of the latter. It comes with Dodid’s Tier-3 data center too, and marks YTL’s first foray into the data center industry outside of Malaysia.

Dodid is a startup in the Singaporean data center scene, and has their own 12.5 megawatt Tier-3 hyperscale data center, with a total of 39,000 square foot of space. It was built in 2018 and uses up to 150W of power per square foot. Dodid claims on their website that their data center, located at Tagore Industrial Ave, has a high ceiling space of at least 4 meters from floor to ceiling too. Hyperscale data centers like these are typically for big businesses and tend to deal with bigger volumes of data and storage than regular data centers.

Dodid’s data center has also been recognised as a ‘green’ data center, with daily energy metering carried out to ensure little to no negative impact on the environment. For their efforts, Dodid had previously been given the BCA-IMDA Green Mark Platinum award. YTL says that they’ll be continuing in this direction, working with YTL PowerSeraya—Singapore’s second largest power producer—and its retail arm Geneco to provide more green energy solutions. The aim is to let the data center be run completely on renewable energy.

“The burgeoning growth of the data center market in Southeast Asia amid digital transformation represents an exciting opportunity for YTL Power to expand our expertise in infrastructure to the digital age. This is a major strategic initiative as we seek to expand our infrastructure platform to build sustainable data-driven ecosystems powered by renewable energy, which will help meet the region’s growing appetite for cloud-based solutions and services,” – Dato’ Yeoh Seok Hong, YTL Power Managing Director

This is just the latest in YTL’s plans to expand in the data center segment. They’re already working on a number of projects to develop 300 megawatts of green data center capacity throughout Southeast Asia by 2030. Domestically, they’re also working on expanding their data center facility in Sentul, Kuala Lumpur.