A subsea cable that lands straight into the data centre
Why the Nongsa Changi Cable matters for Batam and Singapore.
Telin, BW Digital, and Nongsa Digital Park (NDP) today held a landing ceremony for the 50km NCC subsea cable between Singapore and Batam. Here's why it is special.
The Nongsa Changi Cable (NCC) is a joint venture between BW Digital and Telin, and the milestone was marked by a ceremony in Batam attended by ministers, including Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Gan.
Batam data centres
Batam is the site of a growing cluster of data centres in Southeast Asia. Today it hosts around a dozen facilities, almost all built over the last few years.
While Batam is still far from where Johor was a few years ago, acceptance is growing as more operators come onboard. Indeed, Nongsa Digital Park has already embarked on its next phase of expansion. Other operators with either live data centres or facilities under construction there include Nxera, DayOne, and Racks Central.
Enterprise-level latency
When I wrote about Batam last year, I counted 13 subsea cables. What makes the NCC special is how it lands directly at the data centres: BW Digital's upcoming 144MW NDP1 data centre in Nongsa at one end, and Digital Realty's SIN12 data centre on the other.
As reported by Jan Yong last year, once operational the NCC can deliver more than 1.6 petabits per second (Pb/s) of bandwidth, with less than 2ms latency to Singapore. That makes its performance indistinguishable for almost all workloads, and well within the requirements of enterprise users, who typically look for 10ms or less.
Photo Credit: (Left) Tan Chong Ming. (Right) Telin
Complementary markets
Speaking at the recent SIJORI week in Singapore, Edward Tay noted that the data centre markets in Singapore, Johor and Batam are specialised, non-competing nodes.
Because they are specialised and potentially complementary, each de-risks the others, which allows for a complete, bankable platform, Edward explained. In his view, Singapore brings trust, capital and interconnection. Johor brings land and power at scale. Batam brings regulatory diversity and resilience.
And data centre demand in Batam appears to be taking off. At a panel discussion, Dendi Gustinandar of BP Batam revealed that two companies have signed on for data centre deals of 500MW each. BP Batam is Indonesia's Batam Free Trade Zone and Free Port Authority.
So here is the question worth sitting with. Could Singapore, Johor and Batam eventually operate as one distributed data centre region? A cable that lands straight inside the data centres at both ends suggests the answer is edging closer to yes.
