Two recently announced projects in Indonesia and Morocco underline the continuing drive to power data centres in a sustainable manner.
Indonesian data centre developer NeutraDC, a subsidiary of Indonesia’s multinational telecommunications conglomerate Telkom Group, says it has partnered with renewable energy developer Medco Power to deploy solar power at its data centre facility in Batam, the largest city in the Indonesian province of Riau Islands.
The companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the development of solar power at the Kabil Industrial Estate, where the data centre is being developed. The MoU also included a long-term ESG commitment to drive progress towards a greener, AI-ready digital ecosystem.
The Data Centre Dynamics website says the NeutraDC hyperscale data centre is expected to have a capacity exceeding 60MW and will be developed in three phases across an eight-hectare site at an expected cost of US$86 million.
The company broke ground on the project in January 2023, with operations expected to commence in Q3 2025. The initial phase of the project will deliver around 20MW.
The data centre will be majority owned by Telkom Indonesia under the NeutraDC name. Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate Singtel and Medco Power will be minority shareholders.
Meanwhile late last week came the news that Morocco plans to build a 500 megawatt state-owned data centre to strengthen security of data storage. The centre will be located in Dakhla, in Western Sahara.
While this story also highlights the drive from several countries to ensure that sensitive data can be stored and processed within national borders (Morocco launched its first sovereign centre in January at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University) it’s also notable that this facility is to be powered by renewable energy.
That said, Reuters, reporting on the development, was given no details on the timeline or cost or, it seems, the energy source involved.
It’s not clear whether this story is related to the announcement, in mid-June, that Naver, a Korean technology company, will be part of a consortium that aims to construct a 500-megawatt renewable energy-based data centre in Morocco.
