EdgeConneX raises $403.8M in sustainability-linked financing for its Asia expansion effort

EdgeConneX has secured a $403.8 million funding deal in Sustainability-Linked Senior Facilities, accelerating the company's expansion plans and green initiatives for its Jakarta, Indonesia, data center footprint.

The data center provider said this transaction paves the way for increased sustainability capabilities, including power efficiency, renewable energy sources and enhanced safety measures for EdgeConneX to develop multiple data centers in the region that will bring the Indonesian hyperscale campus in Jakarta to over 120MWs. 

Additionally, EdgeConneX unveiled the planned expansions of its Jakarta data center campus in a ribbon-cutting ceremony, welcoming honored guests, including Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan. Other dignitaries involved in the ceremonies included regional officials and local community leaders, along with EdgeConneX Co-founder and CEO Randy Brouckman and Managing Director for APAC Kelvin Fong.

As the largest city in Indonesia and with a population of over 33 million people, Jakarta is an essential gateway to Southeast Asia for commerce, trade, and technology. The city boasts extensive fiber, power density, low-latency interconnectivity, and global peering options. Jakarta is a high-growth market with significant opportunities for cloud giants to accelerate their cloud access, content delivery, and connectivity services.

Leveraging EdgeConneX's Sustainability Strategy, the deal includes Offshore U.S. Dollar borrowing. This format provides for margin adjustments when EdgeConneX meets certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) concerning the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of its data centers, the use of renewable electricity, and achieving safety goals. These KPI targets align with EdgeConneX's Customer, People, Planet strategy, which includes a holistic sustainability policy supporting the company's goal of becoming a carbon-, waste- and water-neutral data center provider by 2030. This forward-leaning plan includes EdgeConneX developing and operating a data center platform powered by 100% renewable energy.

Philbert Shih, founder and managing director of Structure Research, said that EdgeConneX’s entry into Indonesia gives the company a presence in a country showing growth potential in data centers and cloud services.

"Indonesia has strong demographics, a rapidly rising homegrown technology sector, and in-country hyperscale infrastructure, and it is early in the adoption curve for outsourced infrastructure services like cloud and data centers,” he said. “Indonesia has tremendous long-term upside, and Jakarta is central to this growth. Indonesia is home to all the major US and Chinese hyperscale clouds and an emerging social media and webscale tier that will combine to create incredible volumes of demand for hyperscale data centers."

Indonesia is just one of many new country targets for EdgeConneX. Earlier this month, the company entered the Malaysian market with plans to build highly proximate and high-power data centers that will deliver nearly 300 MW combined capacity.

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