Digital Edge (Singapore) Holdings Pte. Ltd.’s NARRA1 Manila data center bagged an award for Innovation in Energy Efficiency, Southeast Asia, at the W.Media Asia Pacific Cloud & Data Center Awards. The award recognizes the company’s efforts to pioneer groundbreaking cooling technology to achieve market-leading levels of energy and water efficiency and demonstrates the growing prominence of the Philippines in the region’s digital infrastructure landscape.
One of the challenges of building data centers in the Philippines is the hot and humid climate, which makes cooling a key operational issue and has a significant impact on the overall energy efficiency of a facility. To address this challenge, in 2023 Digital Edge became the first commercial colocation operator to deploy Nortek’s innovative StatePoint liquid cooling technology in Asia . StatePoint uses a proprietary liquid-to-air membrane energy exchanger technology that enables evaporative cooling and allows for higher cooling density and flexibility in cooling system design.
The use of this technology, alongside NARRA1’s efficient engineering design, enabled the data center to achieve a market-leading annualized design Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.193. In addition, during the initial Phase 1 testing conducted in early 2023, the facility exceeded expectations by achieving a PUE of 1.15 at 75 percent load under optimized conditions. The company estimates the technology, at the lowest estimate, was able to achieve annual electricity and water savings of approximately 11 percent and 33 percent, respectively, with the latter equivalent to 30 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water saved every year.
Vic Barrios, country manager for Digital Edge in the Philippines, commented, “We are delighted to receive this recognition less than one year since we opened our facility, marking the first award for NARRA1. The use of the StatePoint Liquid cooling technology helped us achieve what we believe to be one of the most energy-efficient data centers in Southeast Asia, and we are proud that our facility is helping position the Philippines at the forefront of data center innovation in the region.”
Raymond Rufino, principal for Investments and Real Estate of the Threadborne Group, Digital Edge’s joint partner on the NARRA1 project, added, “Data centers consume between 20 and 50 times the energy of a typical office building so it’s critical that we make every watt of energy count. Since the outset of this project, we have worked to build one of the most advanced and sustainable facilities in the market. We have proven that a PUE of less than 1.2 is possible despite the challenges of a tropical climate. We are honored that our NARRA1 facility is setting new standards for the industry to aspire to, both in the Philippines and beyond.”
With 2,200 cabinets and 10MW of IT power, NARRA1 is the largest carrier neutral data center in operation in the Philippines, designed to meet the latest demands from cloud, network and enterprise customers, including high power density deployment such as AI. Since its launch in March 2023, the company has already signed a number of key customers for the facility, including major domestic internet service providers. Digital Edge is also deploying the StatePoint liquid cooling technology at its new EDGE2 data center in Jakarta, which will be ready for service in Q1 2024.
About Digital Edge
Headquartered in Singapore, Digital Edge is a trusted and forward-looking data center platform company established to transform digital infrastructure in Asia. Through building and operating state-of-the-art, energy-efficient data centers rich with connectivity options, Digital Edge aims to bring new colocation and interconnect options to the Asian market, making infrastructure deployment in the region easy, efficient and economical.
Digital Edge was founded by a seasoned senior management team with decades of industry experience and an established track record of value creation in the data center, cloud and telecommunications industries in the Asia Pacific region. Backed by leading alternative investment firm Stonepeak, Digital Edge has in excess of US$1 billion in deployed and committed capital, establishing itself as a market leading pan-Asia data center platform. The company provides data center and fiber services across Asia, with a presence in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and the Philippines.
