Publication
Government Investigations in Singapore 2025
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
Global | Publication | January 2021
The dramatic and unpredictable events of 2020 have fuelled the growth of digital infrastructure development and investment in the Asia-Pacific region and we expect that opportunities will continue to abound for operators and investors alike.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the APAC region already exhibited appealing supply and demand characteristics when compared to other global markets. On APAC’s side were a variety of factors, such as:
The shift to digital work and pervasive need for technological connectivity caused by COVID-19 has been a rising tide buoying all boats on the demand-side, leading to an acceleration in infrastructure development and investment across APAC.
We have no doubt that the growth forecasts and capital intensity of centralized hyperscale data centers will continue to appeal to private equity and pension/superannuation fund investors in the coming year. As businesses in Singapore, Japan and Australia catch up further with the US in terms of outsourcing to the cloud, we expect there will be increased focus on earlier stage hyperscale markets like Korea, Indonesia and India. It will also be interesting to see if (and when) the emerging US trend of some enterprises partially pivoting away from cloud solutions to local co-location data centers (for data sovereignty or other reasons) will provide additional opportunities for wholesale data center operators and investors in the more mature APAC markets.
Accelerated by 5G deployments, the development of smaller edge data center networks is also expected to increase. This is likely to be at varying speeds depending on the jurisdiction and its relative enthusiasm for investment in 5G and adjacent technologies.
2021 should also see the consummation of tower network sales across parts of APAC to help fund 5G deployments, particularly in Australia. It will be interesting to see if similar investment opportunities will arise in relation to subsea cables or existing fiber networks owned by telecoms and technology companies.
The pace at which CapEx spend has grown across all parts of the digital infrastructure sector has also seen a convergence of market participants, with established operators more frequently teaming up with private equity and more traditional infrastructure investors to access capital. In some cases, major joint ventures targeting particular data center investments have been formed and consortia mixing financial investors and operators are continuing to be assembled for pending asset sales.
Publication
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
Publication
The private credit market and direct lending have grown and diversified immensely in the past decade, offering alternative sources and terms of debt compared to those historically provided by the syndicated leveraged loan and public issuance markets. Consequently, they are fast becoming pivotal components in the capital ecosystem, so much so that the Bank of England consider that the private credit market is currently responsible for approximately $1.8 trillion of debt issuance, which is four times its size in 2015. This growth has been particularly pronounced in Europe and the US but there has also been significant activity in Asia.
Publication
The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Regulation, commonly referred to as the AI Act, is expected to come into force during the summer of 2024 (the AI Act). The AI Act will be the first comprehensive legal framework for the use and development of artificial intelligence (AI), and is intended to ensure that AI systems developed and used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly.
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