How a random walk down Tiong Bahru Estate brought PDG to Singapore!

Rangu Salgame first stepped foot in Singapore thirty years ago. His MBA class at The Wharton School had decided against traveling to Eastern Europe for their international?case study trip, which would have been the obvious choice after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, he and his classmates were fascinated by the remarkable?transformation and development of a small Southeast Asian Island nation 10,000 miles away.?

Walking around in the Singapore heat on that trip in 1994 sparked a keen appreciation of the country for Salgame. Meeting with senior policy makers and government officials, including then-Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, confirmed to him that the Asian Tiger's relentless growth would catapult it onto the global stage. This was a unique place, he thought—one that seamlessly blended smart economic policies, effective governance, and a moderating sense of foresight, all against the backdrop of a rich multiethnic cultural fabric reflected in the Chinatown durian and Little India dosa he had scarfed down. Salgame quickly felt a gravitational pull to the island, reinforced by the sight of pre-war Art Deco buildings he stumbled upon in Tiong Bahru Estate that?reminded him of the neighborhood of Bombay, where he grew up. Full of newfound knowledge and reflections, Salgame and his classmates put pen to paper upon returning to business school. They analyzed the country's economic and public policies and even wrote a paper on Singapore's public housing program.

Salgame has frequented Singapore on business ever since, particularly while running Cisco Systems’?Asia region in the early 2000s and more recently while managing Tata Communications' global businesses. It was Princeton Digital Group (PDG), however, that finally made Singapore a home for Salgame.

When Salgame and his co-founder Varoon Raghavan founded PDG in New York six years ago, they had a vision of creating a pan-Asia data center business to serve some of the world’s largest and most demanding cloud and tech companies. Global private equity giant Warburg Pincus backed the firm, and as PDG began to take form, Salgame and Raghavan decided to move the company's headquarters to Asia. They chose Singapore. With its center of gravity now firmly rooted in Singapore's CBD, PDG is executing a $5 billion capital program and now has operations in 6 countries with a portfolio of 21 data centers. In addition to Warburg Pincus, two other global blue-chip firms have invested in PDG over the last 3 years, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Mubadala.

Large scale data centers are what enables deployment of AI, and PDG, as an industry leader, is capturing a significant part of AI growth in Asia. The capital investment required for data centers to keep up with AI-led demand is expected to quadruple that for the cloud.

As PDG moves to its new global headquarters in CapitaGreen on July 12, the company is embarking on its next wave of AI-led growth and a multi-billion dollar expansion of its capital program to deepen in its current markets ((Singapore, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan) and enter new markets like South Korea and Australia.