If you wanted to pick a big winner during the pandemic, data centres would have been an excellent choice. Volumes of data production and usage were already rising rapidly, and the pandemic only accelerated the need for storage for huge amounts of data.

Pandemic-led demand for video conferencing, online schooling and entertainment, social networking, and platforms to support remote working produced a 47 percent year-over-year surge in global internet traffic in 2020, surpassing initial forecasts of 28 percent, according to CBRE’s recent report, Asia Pacific Data Centre Trends H2 2020. The spike in data storage requirements this past year caused net absorption in Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong to double compared with 2019 volume, marking an all-time high. And Knight Frank’s The Data Centre Report, APAC, Q4 2020, released in April 2021, indicates the region’s data centre market is expected to see 90 percent growth of additional data centre capacit