Without offering a long-term data centre land supply policy, the Hong Kong SAR Government puts its 'hopes' on two measures announced in the 2012-13 Budget Speech to give the data centre sector some boost.

According to the Office of the Government CIO (OGCIO), the government will take applications from June 25, 2012 to Mar 31, 2016 for the two measures --the exemption of waiver fee for changing parts of an eligible industrial building into data centre use and premium assessment for the lease modification on the basis of high-tier data centre use for the data centre part of a proposed project. "The government will exempt the waiver fee now chargeable according to standard rates for using existing industrial buildings for IT and telecoms industries that include data centre business," said the government CIO Daniel Lai when explaining the waiver fee exemption.

Source: IDG