At the groundbreaking of its 11th and largest hyperscale data center in Sta. Rosa, Laguna on Friday, March 18, PLDT president and CEO Al Panlilio said the soon-to-be-built facility will be the biggest in the country with no peers in its class.
“Others can say what they want but this facility is the real one,” said Panlilio during the press briefing held prior to the ceremony formally commencing the construction of the data center. “This is the second coming of the BPO industry.”
There appears to be a data center construction boom in the Philippines and the PLDT official was apparently refuting the claim of Singapore-based tech firm SpaceDC, which earlier said it is building the biggest data center facility in the country in its campus-type site in Cainta, Rizal.
The telco said Vitro Sta. Rosa will rise as the country’s largest data center campus by far — a five-hectare PLDT property in the booming industrial city of Sta. Rosa. It is the first in a series of data center builds totaling to a power capacity of 100MW. In contrast, the SpaceDC facility will be just be under five hectares at 43,000 square meters and will deliver 72MW of critical power.
PLDT said the data center facility is designed to be energy efficient utilizing the latest innovations in cooling and power redundancy, Tier-3 certified and Tier-4 ready, and with a high level of network diversity with at least three fiber routes from PLDT and augmented by routes from other carriers.
“The PLDT Group is one with the nation in building a digitally advanced Philippines and making our country the next hyperscaler destination in Asia Pacific. With Vitro Sta. Rosa, we aim to set the benchmark in infrastructure resilience, operational excellence, global competitiveness and world-class sustainability,” stated Panlilio.
“A facility of this caliber only ensures the best possible customer experience not only for our hyperscale clients, but also for the Filipino end-users consuming their services. We at PLDT Group are committed to providing world-class services to our global enterprise clients and enabling the digital transformation of the country and the Filipino people.”
To ensure hyperscalers maximum operational uptime, PLDT has partnered with Meralco to build a dedicated substation on-site that will directly supply the data center’s power requirements.
As a power-intensive facility, PLDT said it has partnered with RED Engineering to co-develop the design of the facility based on global LEED standards and the PLDT Group’s UN Sustainable Development Goals.
