Hawaiʻi tech company Servpac is adding a new building to its data center in the Mililani Technology Park.
Despite the additional space, most Hawaiʻi data is stored on the continent.
Servpac’s new 15,000-square-foot building will boost the company’s data center space by half. The project is underway and is scheduled to be finished by the middle of this year.
Such an expansion is a rare move for Hawaiʻi. The continental U.S. is seeing a massive wave of data center development. But Hawaiʻi’s high cost of electricity is preventing the same surge in the islands.
Servpac President Richard Zheng said his company’s electric bill is higher than what’s common on the continent. But he said running a data center locally provides faster and more reliable access to data for local companies. He said Servpac is seeing high demand despite the higher price tag.
Zheng said the main reason for keeping data local is latency — the time it takes for a program to respond.
He said if it’s run locally, it can take about one millisecond to respond. But if it runs on the continent, it can take up to 50 times longer. And that can cause issues for applications that rely on being fast.
Zheng said reliability is another reason to keep data local. Local companies can continue to access their data even if there’s an interrupted connection to the continent.
He told PBN that the need to keep data local is expected to continue driving demand for data centers like Servpac’s. He said that even if 90% of the data stays on the continent, the 10% in Hawaiʻi already creates a huge demand.
