Speech by Mr. Kingsley Wong, Assistant Government Chief Information Officer (Industry Development), at the “Transforming towards Sustainable Data Centres Webinar”

Dr Anthony LO (Director, CLP), Mr KY LO (Deputy Director, CLP), Mr KW TANG (Director, Equinix), honourable guests, ladies and gentlemen,

Good afternoon! It is my great pleasure to meet you all at this webinar on “Transforming Towards Sustainable Data Centres”. I would like to express my greatest appreciation to CLP for organising this webinar to raise the industry’s awareness on the data centre development and its sustainability in Hong Kong. It provides an excellent platform for operators and practitioners to share insights on the latest development of engineering technology for building green, energy efficient and agile data centres.

Data centres are essential ICT infrastructure to support the development of digital economy. Given our position as an international financial, trading and logistics hub, and home to regional headquarters and offices of many multinational corporations, our capability of providing high-performance, secure and reliable data centre services is crucial for smooth business operations and continuing growth of our pillar industries and other business sectors in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has always been a prime location for data centres, given our proximity to the Mainland, conducive business environment, stable government, transparent and independent legal system, free flow of information, reliable power supply, excellent telecommunications infrastructure and low risk of natural disasters.

Thanks for CLP’s contribution. Hong Kong has supreme electricity supply with reliability level exceeding 99.999%. In addition, Hong Kong enjoys a relatively low electricity tariff in comparison with other Asia-Pacific cities, which is a big attraction for operators as power is always a main cost driver in the data centre business.

The Government has been committed to promoting data centre development in Hong Kong by implementing various facilitation measures, which include the provision of suitable land for high-tier data centre development, encouraging conversion of industrial buildings and use of industry lots to data centres through waiver fee exemption and tailor-made lease modification. So far, these facilitation measures have contributed over 200 000 square meters floor space in the current local data centre supply.

In addition, we have set up a Data Centre Facilitation Unit in OGCIO to provide one-stop support services to local and non-local enterprises interested in operating data centre in Hong Kong. The team works closely with the industry, relevant government departments and the power companies to address the unique operational requirements of data centres.

All these measures have given impetus to the development of data centre industry in Hong Kong to cope with the accelerating demand driven by increasing adoption of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, Internet of Things and 5G network services etc.

The local data centre development is indeed advancing rapidly in recent years. According to the latest market research report on “Global Data Centre Market Comparison”, Hong Kong is ranked the sixth in the world and the second in Asia-Pacific.

The total data centre floor space has increased to nearly 800 000 square meters in 2021. We also note an increasing number of data centre development projects being initiated in Hong Kong, including a surging number of industrial buildings in Kwai Chung to be converted to data centres, which are expected to produce around 200 000 square meters additional floor space for this data centre cluster.

These considerable expansions of the data centre business involving local and non-local enterprises reaffirm our strong edge as a regional data centre hub.

Furthermore, the industry’s awareness of energy efficiency and environmental protection has been growing. There is an increasing trend for existing data centres to undergo green transformation and new data centres to adopt green design.

Led by the BEAM Society, several government departments including OGCIO as well as other stakeholders also joined hands to develop the BEAM Plus Data Centres assessment tools in 2021 to further facilitate the industry transformation.

Our pursuit today of a sustainable data centre development will be crucial to ensuring that our future generations can continue to thrive in a clean and green environment.

The Government will continue to work closely with industry stakeholders, including for sure our close partner CLP, to promote data centre development, and further consolidate Hong Kong’s position as a world-leading smart city. I am sure we can enhance the sustainable development of Hong Kong together. Thank you.

- ENDS -