Equinix will build its first data centre in Indonesia, an eight-storey International Business Exchange facility in central Jakarta, at a cost of about USD 74 million. The company says it will open in the second half of 2024 and provide more than 1,600 cabinets and more than 5,300 square metres of colocation space when fully built.

Indonesia, which Equinix describes as Southeast Asia's largest digital economy by value, has drawn cloud regions from Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud, and the company expects the country to become the region's second-largest public cloud market. The site is in the central business district, close to major internet exchanges.

Cost per cabinet, and the company that got there first

At about USD 74 million for 1,600 cabinets, the facility works out at roughly USD 46,000 per cabinet, before the cost of the land or the fit-out each tenant needs. That is the kind of figure an operator can only carry if the campus fills and the interconnection revenue follows, and Equinix's argument is that its platform lets customers reach networks and cloud providers they already use.

The company is not first into Indonesia. Other operators announced campuses in Jakarta and Bekasi before it, and an incumbent with more local capacity can negotiate harder on price. Equinix's president for Asia-Pacific, Jeremy Deutsch, says a presence in Indonesia lets the company serve local businesses abroad and multinationals at home. The claim is reasonable; the returns are not yet testable. Jakarta's central business district is the expensive place to build, and the choice trades land cost for proximity to the exchanges where the traffic is. The company says the design uses a cooling method it calls cool array, and that the build aligns with the government's Indonesia Digital Roadmap for 2021 to 2024.