The drive to ensure that the data centre industry can be seen as a responsible user of power continues, with two recent announcements in Asia and Africa emphasising plans to use renewables.
The first involves Citicore Renewable Energy Corporation (CREC), a renewable energy producer in the Philippines that manages a diversified portfolio of renewable energy generation projects, and Evolution Data Centres, a sustainable hyperscale and AI data centre developer focused on underserved markets across Southeast Asia.
These two companies have signed a strategic memorandum of understanding (MoU) that, they say, marks a groundbreaking initiative to jointly develop a hyperscale-ready data centre facility powered entirely by renewable energy, facilitated through a power purchase agreement (PPA) for up to 100MWAC of baseload and 24/7 renewable power, including new-to-grid supply sources.
Details are still sketchy, but Darren Webb, co-founder and CEO of Evolution Data Centres, says: “The Philippines has an attractive outlook for renewable power growth and an open access power market, which positions it well to be a key beneficiary of the next phase of data centre market growth.” He adds: “We are thrilled to extend our partnership with Citicore to jointly provide our customers with 24/7 baseload renewable power, while reducing our customers’ cost of power substantially below what is available in the open market today."
Meanwhile, Somalian service provider Hormuud says it plans to build more green data centres to support the growing demands of the local and the global AI economy, despite the country’s security concerns and infrastructure gaps.
The target capacity for the new facilities will depend on demand but, as Hormuud CEO Ahmed Mohamud Yusuf points out: “Somalia is one of the sunniest countries in the world and many of our data centres are already running on solar power during the day.”
Indeed, Bloomberg reports that Hormuud has 11 data centres with a combined 10 megawatts of capacity, and in some of Hormuud’s data centres as much as 95% of the energy comes from solar during the day.
