UDigital Realty has established a joint venture with Bersama Digital Infrastructure Asia (BDIA) based in Jakarta, with each holding a 50% stake, to enter the Indonesian data center market and develop and operate data centers nationwide.

BDIA’s operator neutral data center platform Bersama Digital Data Center (BDDC) will join the joint venture, while Digital Realty will invest approximately $100 million to acquire a 50% stake in the data center and adjacent land, which will support further expansion.

In addition to equity, Digital Realty will also receive property management and development fees from the joint venture.

The new joint venture, Digital Realty Bersama, will take over BDDC’s campus, which includes the recently opened CGK11 data center in central Jakarta and CGK10 facilities in western Jakarta.

CGK11 was initially launched with an IT load capacity of 5 megawatts (MW), and is expected to support up to 32 MW of capacity through the next phase of expansion. It will also be directly connected with Indonesia Internet Service Providers Association (APJII), the largest Internet exchange provider in Indonesia, making it one of the data centers with the closest connection and the highest network density in the center of Jakarta.

Serene Nah, Managing Director of Digital Realty Asia Pacific, stated in a statement, “This joint venture combines Digital Realty’s global data center expertise and scale with BDDC’s local market knowledge and strong connections to create unique value propositions for our clients.”

Digital Realty Bersama will be led by the BDDC management team led by CEO Angelo Syailendra and Chairman Setyanto Hantoro. Krishna Worotikan, former CFO of Microsoft Indonesia, has joined the new company as CFO.

The company stated that it expects to see strong demand for data center solutions to handle the growing artificial intelligence and cloud workloads in Indonesia.

Quoting data from Structure Research, the data center operator added that the hosting market in Jakarta alone is expected to generate $499 million by 2025, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 11%, and is expected to absorb approximately 54.6 megawatts.

“We believe that the Southeast Asian digital infrastructure industry is very attractive given the exponential growth in data consumption and the huge capital demand for infrastructure to meet demand, “said Verena Lim, Co Head of Asset Management Infrastructure for Asia Pacific and CEO of Macquarie Group,”

The consortium led by Saratoga Investama Sedaya, Macquarie Asset Management, is the major shareholder of BDIA, along with Provident Capital Partners and Distro Hub.

Lim added, “We are delighted to collaborate with Digital Realty on Digital Realty Bersama and believe that their global industry expertise will complement Bersama’s strong field presence and local relationships.”