The infrastructure services market in APAC continues to progress in a landscape with many moving parts. Hyperscale self-builds, China’s struggles, and slower public cloud growth continue to impact the demand profile for colocation while macroeconomic headwinds persist.
Despite the conditions, there are plenty of dynamics providing an offsetting effect. Webscale providers have expanded into the region, and major content platforms like ByteDance are building out more infrastructure and consuming capacity in multi-MW increments. This progress has supplemented the softening of demand caused by self-builds and the lower levels of growth coming from hyperscale public clouds.
However, other areas of the market are still emerging that will help boost demand for infrastructure. AI has not quite materialized in APAC yet. Still, the planning is well underway, and GPU cloud providers and hyperscale clouds are set to expand aggressively into the region. There are already locations suitable to accommodate this demand, like Johor in Malaysia. However, much of the area does not lack space and power, and it is entirely possible that AI builds will start to pop up in other markets. The demand profile for the sector is not going to taper off, but it is clearly shifting.
