The Prime Location for Data Centres

Hong Kong is a major financial and international trading and logistics hub and is home to many regional offices and headquarters of global corporations. This generates great demand for secure data centre facilities and services to support business growth in the Mainland of China and the region.

Hong Kong is an ideal location for data centres with our robust telecommunications infrastructure as well as geographical and strategic advantages:

Robust Telecommunications Infrastructure

Hong Kong's telecommunications infrastructure is one of the world's most sophisticated and advanced, with a wide range of innovative and advanced services available at low cost. Currently, our telecommunication networks are connecting to 12 external submarine optical fibre cable systems. Moreover, several submarine cable systems are under construction. Our fully liberalised regime enables a vibrant market of Internet transit, exchange, hosting and content providers. We have among the world's highest penetration rates of mobile subscribers and household broadband. There are about 300 internet service providers licensed to provide broadband services in Hong Kong, ensuring plenty of competition and choice for data centre operators.

Reliability

Even a brief shut-down of data centre services can be devastating. Fortunately for Hong Kong, we face a low risk of natural calamities such as earthquakes and tornadoes. Most of the earthquake epicentres that cause felt tremors in Hong Kong are situated outside the territory, and no locally felt earth tremor has ever caused any casualty since records began.

Moreover, the reliability level of our electricity power supply is supreme, which currently exceeds 99.999%. Our two power companies rely on different fuels of power generation with extra capacity and robustness of supply, as well as emergency support to each other during generator failure.

Proximity to the Mainland of China

Business tends to locate where the market is and so do data centres. The Mainland is a significant market as well as provider of information and communications technology (ICT) products and services. Policies and measures have been set to drive its overall ICT development, in particular in cloud computing, e-business, Internet of Things and logistics. The Government has always emphasised the internationalisation of China's service industries, including the information industry. These create substantial demand for data centre services of high security and serviceability.

Demand for Data Centre Services

Data centres provides strong support to Hong Kong's pillar industries and other emerging service industries. Financial services & insurance and trading & logistics sectors accounted for about half of the total data centre space. These sectors are thriving. With their increasing reliance on ICT, together with the growth of high frequency stock trading and e-commerce, as well as the advent of cloud computing, demand for data centre services is surging.

Free Flow of Information

In Hong Kong, there is free flow of information with no censorship of content and adequate protection of data privacy. These are critical to support global data centre operations. The Government has never interfered with data centre operations or censored content and there are no laws that allow the Government to do so.

Protection of Data Privacy

Data protection provides a conducive and trustworthy environment for regional data centres to operate. In Hong Kong the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, which has been in force since 1996, provides the legislative framework for the protection of personal data in terms of collection, use and transfer.

ICT Talent

Hong Kong has a large pool of mobile, agile, skilled and multi-lingual ICT professionals. Our local immigration policies also facilitate professional expatriates from around the world to work here.

Pro-Business Environment

Hong Kong is one of the world's freest economies, characterised by free trade, a free market system, free flow of capital, simple and predictable tax regime and low tax rate. For more about Hong Kong's strengths and competitive advantages, please refer to "Hong Kong – The Prime Location for Data Centres" and "Hong Kong – An ICT Hub".