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One Belt
One Net

An audacious vision to create Asia's most interconnected data centre network — linking the economic corridors of China's Belt and Road Initiative with next-generation digital infrastructure that will define the continent's technological future.

01 — The Vision

What Is One Belt One Net?

One Belt One Net — OBON — is a transformative infrastructure initiative conceived by Oei Hong Leong to build a continent-spanning network of interconnected, next-generation data centres along the corridors established by China's Belt and Road Initiative. It represents the convergence of two of the twenty-first century's most powerful forces: the physical infrastructure revolution reshaping Eurasia, and the exponential growth of digital data that underpins every facet of the modern global economy.

Where the Belt and Road Initiative lays railways, highways, and shipping lanes, OBON envisions the parallel construction of a digital backbone — fibre-optic arteries, hyperscale data centres, edge computing nodes, and cloud platforms that will carry the data upon which Asia's next century of economic growth will depend. This is not simply a business venture. It is a strategic repositioning of digital power, a recognition that in the coming decades, the nations and enterprises that control data infrastructure will wield influence comparable to those that once controlled oil pipelines and shipping routes.

OBON's founding thesis is both simple and profound: as Asia's digital economy surges past twenty trillion dollars in value, the continent lacks a unified, high-performance data infrastructure capable of supporting that growth. Data generated in Jakarta must traverse undersea cables to reach processing facilities in Virginia or Frankfurt. Artificial intelligence models trained in Shenzhen rely on cloud platforms headquartered in Seattle. The latency, cost, and geopolitical vulnerability inherent in this architecture represent a strategic weakness that OBON is designed to eliminate.

Core Thesis

Data Is the
New Real Estate

Oei Hong Leong's career was built on the insight that physical location creates enduring value. With OBON, he applies that same principle to the digital realm. A data centre positioned at the intersection of fibre-optic routes is the twenty-first-century equivalent of a tower at the crossroads of trade routes. It is strategic geography reimagined for the information age — owning the land through which the world's data must flow.

The parallels are striking: just as prime real estate derives its value from scarcity and location, data centre capacity in strategically positioned markets commands premium pricing and long-term contractual commitments from the world's largest technology companies.

02 — Strategic Context

The Belt and Road
Digital Imperative

China's Belt and Road Initiative represents the most ambitious infrastructure programme in human history — a multi-trillion-dollar effort spanning more than one hundred and forty countries, creating new trade corridors that connect East Asia to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East through highways, railways, ports, and energy networks.

Yet for all its scale, the BRI's original vision focused primarily on physical infrastructure. OBON addresses a critical gap: the digital layer. Every factory built along the BRI corridor, every port automated with smart logistics, every city connected to the new Silk Road economic zones — all of them generate torrents of data that require local processing, secure storage, and high-speed connectivity. Without a robust digital infrastructure layer, the physical BRI risks becoming a network of disconnected nodes, each reliant on distant foreign data centres for the computational power their economies increasingly demand.

OBON positions itself as the indispensable digital complement to the physical BRI. By building data centres at the nexus points where road, rail, and maritime corridors converge, the initiative creates a digital overlay that amplifies the economic value of every physical infrastructure investment. A smart port in Gwadar becomes exponentially more valuable when backed by a hyperscale data centre capable of processing real-time logistics data. A manufacturing hub in Central Asia can deploy artificial intelligence and robotics when supported by low-latency edge computing facilities within the same economic zone.

One Belt One Net data centre infrastructure vision — Asia's digital backbone
"The future of Asia's economy will be built on data. Whoever controls the infrastructure that data flows through will shape the continent's destiny for the next century."

— Oei Hong Leong

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BRI Partner Nations
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Asia Digital Economy by 2030
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Annual Cloud Growth in APAC
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Planned Data Centre Capacity
03 — The Opportunity

Asia's Digital
Infrastructure Gap

Despite generating approximately forty percent of global GDP and being home to more than half the world's internet users, Asia remains critically underserved in data centre capacity relative to its economic weight. The continent's share of global hyperscale data centre capacity lags far behind North America and Europe, creating a structural deficit that widens with every passing quarter.

The disparity is most acute in the emerging economies along the BRI corridors — Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East — where digital adoption is accelerating at extraordinary rates but local data processing infrastructure remains embryonic. Businesses in these regions are forced to route their data through distant hubs, paying premium connectivity costs, enduring higher latency, and exposing sensitive commercial and governmental data to foreign jurisdictions.

OBON's strategic insight is that this infrastructure gap represents not merely a business opportunity but a generational window. The enterprises and governments building their digital capabilities today will lock in infrastructure partnerships for decades. First movers who deliver reliable, locally positioned, internationally connected data centre capacity will establish the kind of structural competitive advantage that compounds over time — much as the first railways created enduring advantages for the cities they connected.

04 — Market Drivers

The Business Case:
Exponential Demand

Three converging technological revolutions are driving unprecedented demand for data centre capacity across Asia, creating the economic foundation upon which OBON's vision rests:

Cloud Computing

Asia-Pacific cloud infrastructure spending is growing at thirty-five percent annually, as enterprises across the region migrate from legacy on-premises systems to cloud-native architectures. This migration creates sustained, contractually committed demand for data centre capacity — the kind of predictable, long-duration revenue stream that underpins infrastructure investment at scale. Major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud are all actively expanding their Asian footprint, seeking partners who can deliver purpose-built facilities in strategic locations.

Artificial Intelligence

The AI revolution is fundamentally reshaping data centre economics. Training large language models and running inference workloads demands specialised facilities equipped with high-density GPU clusters, advanced liquid cooling systems, and enormous power supplies. Asia's AI market is projected to exceed one hundred billion dollars by 2030, and every dollar of AI compute revenue requires a corresponding investment in physical infrastructure. OBON's facilities are being designed from the ground up to support these demanding AI workloads — a critical differentiator in a market where many existing data centres lack the power density and cooling capacity that AI requires.

Internet of Things

The proliferation of connected devices across smart cities, autonomous logistics networks, industrial automation, and precision agriculture is generating data volumes that dwarf traditional enterprise computing. Asia is expected to account for more than half of the world's IoT connections by 2030, each generating continuous streams of data that must be processed locally with minimal latency. This creates demand not only for centralised hyperscale facilities but for distributed edge computing nodes — a network architecture that OBON is uniquely positioned to deliver through its geographically distributed corridor model.

Geographic Strategy

Key Locations Along
the Belt and Road

OBON's geographic strategy mirrors the logic of the Belt and Road itself — positioning infrastructure at the critical nodes where trade corridors intersect, where economic activity concentrates, and where digital demand is accelerating fastest.

Southeast Asia Hub

Singapore &
Indonesia

Singapore serves as OBON's command centre and primary interconnection hub — the world's most connected city-state, positioned at the crossroads of Asia's submarine cable networks. The city's political stability, rule of law, and world-class power infrastructure make it the natural anchor for the entire network. Adjacent Indonesia, with its two hundred and seventy million digital consumers and rapidly expanding cloud adoption, represents the single largest growth market in Southeast Asia.

China Gateway

Greater China &
the Maritime Silk Road

China's data centre market — the world's second largest — forms a critical pillar of the OBON network. Strategic facilities in southern China's Greater Bay Area and along the eastern seaboard connect directly to the Maritime Silk Road corridors, providing the high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnection that cross-border digital commerce demands. These facilities serve as the gateway between China's domestic digital ecosystem and the broader OBON network, enabling seamless data flows for enterprises operating across multiple Asian markets while ensuring compliance with China's evolving data sovereignty requirements.

  • Greater Bay Area hyperscale campus serving Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou markets
  • Submarine cable landing stations connecting to ASEAN and South Asian corridors
  • Cross-border data compliance infrastructure supporting multinational enterprise requirements
South Asia Corridor

India, Pakistan &
the Subcontinent

India's digital transformation — propelled by one of the world's youngest populations and the rapid expansion of digital payments, e-commerce, and government digitisation — is creating data centre demand that doubles approximately every three years. OBON's South Asian strategy targets the critical Mumbai-Chennai-Hyderabad triangle, where India's technology industry concentrates, while also developing facilities in Pakistan's Gwadar and Lahore corridors to serve the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, one of the BRI's flagship projects. These facilities will support the compute-intensive workloads of India's burgeoning AI industry and the growing cloud adoption across South Asian enterprises.

Central Asia & Middle East

The New
Digital Frontier

Central Asia and the Middle East represent OBON's most forward-looking deployments. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the Gulf states are investing heavily in digital transformation, yet local data centre capacity remains nascent. OBON's facilities in these regions — positioned along the overland Belt corridors — will serve as the digital backbone for emerging smart city projects, fintech ecosystems, and the growing computational requirements of energy-sector digitalisation. The Middle Eastern deployments particularly target the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where sovereign wealth funds are making massive bets on AI and cloud infrastructure.

05 — Technology

Next-Generation
Infrastructure Design

OBON's data centres are not conventional colocation facilities. They are purpose-engineered environments designed to meet the extreme computational demands of artificial intelligence, real-time analytics, and hyperscale cloud computing — workloads that existing infrastructure across much of Asia cannot adequately support.

Each facility in the OBON network is designed to Tier III or Tier IV standards, incorporating the latest advances in power distribution, cooling technology, and physical security. The network architecture employs a hub-and-spoke model, with hyperscale anchor facilities in major markets connected to distributed edge computing nodes along the BRI corridors through dedicated dark fibre and wavelength-division multiplexing systems.

  • High-density compute halls supporting power densities of thirty kilowatts per rack and above, enabling GPU-intensive AI training workloads
  • Hybrid cooling systems combining indirect evaporative cooling with rear-door heat exchangers and immersion cooling for the highest-density deployments
  • Redundant power architecture with on-site generation, battery energy storage systems, and dual-feed utility connections ensuring 99.999% uptime
  • Software-defined networking across the entire OBON backbone, enabling dynamic workload migration and automated failover between geographically distributed facilities
  • Zero-trust security architecture with biometric access control, man-trap entries, 24/7 surveillance, and SOC 2 Type II certification across all facilities
  • Modular construction methodology enabling rapid capacity deployment — from ground-breaking to operational in as few as twelve months
Power
99.999%
Target Uptime Availability
Density
30kW+
Per-Rack Power Density
Speed
400G
Backbone Interconnect Capacity
Deployment
12mo
Modular Build Timeline
06 — Impact

Economic Impact &
Job Creation

The economic multiplier effects of data centre infrastructure are among the highest of any capital investment category. For every dollar invested in data centre construction, studies consistently demonstrate between three and five dollars of downstream economic activity — spanning construction, equipment manufacturing, ongoing operations, and the digital businesses that the infrastructure enables.

OBON's network, once fully deployed, is projected to directly employ thousands of skilled technicians, engineers, security professionals, and facility managers across multiple countries. More significantly, the indirect employment effects — driven by the digital businesses, cloud services companies, and technology startups that cluster around reliable data infrastructure — are estimated at a multiplier of ten to one. Each data centre becomes a nucleus for local technology ecosystems, attracting software developers, managed service providers, systems integrators, and digital enterprises that collectively transform the employment landscape of their host communities.

Beyond employment, OBON facilities serve as catalysts for broader digital economic development. Nations along the BRI corridors that gain access to world-class data infrastructure can accelerate their digital transformation timelines by years — enabling e-commerce platforms, fintech services, digital government, telemedicine, and precision agriculture that would otherwise be constrained by inadequate local computing capacity. This positions OBON as not merely a commercial enterprise but a strategic enabler of economic development across emerging Asia.

07 — Competitive Edge

Competitive Landscape
& Differentiation

The global data centre industry is dominated by a handful of hyperscale operators and real estate investment trusts — Equinix, Digital Realty, NTT Global Data Centers, and their peers — who have built formidable positions in established markets. OBON does not seek to compete with these incumbents on their home turf. Instead, it pursues a differentiated strategy built on three pillars:

Corridor-First Architecture

While competitors build individual data centres in individual cities, OBON builds interconnected corridors. The value proposition is not a single facility but a network — a customer in Singapore can burst workloads to OBON facilities across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East through a unified platform with consistent service levels and a single contractual relationship. This network effect creates switching costs and competitive moats that individual-site operators cannot replicate.

BRI Alignment

OBON's strategic alignment with the Belt and Road Initiative provides access to government relationships, infrastructure co-development opportunities, and preferential positioning in emerging economic zones that are unavailable to operators without deep BRI engagement. This alignment extends to financing — BRI-linked infrastructure benefits from development finance institutions, sovereign wealth fund participation, and bilateral investment frameworks that reduce the cost of capital and de-risk deployment in frontier markets.

AI-Native Design

Unlike legacy data centres retrofitted for high-density computing, every OBON facility is designed from inception to support AI and machine learning workloads. This means purpose-built power distribution for GPU clusters, liquid cooling infrastructure as standard rather than afterthought, and network architectures optimised for the east-west traffic patterns that characterise distributed AI training. As the AI revolution drives an unprecedented surge in demand for specialised compute infrastructure, OBON's AI-native facilities command premium pricing and attract the highest-value tenants.

08 — Leadership
The Visionary

Oei Hong Leong's
Role in OBON

Oei Hong Leong brings to OBON something that few data centre entrepreneurs possess: a half-century of experience in identifying infrastructure assets at the point of maximum strategic value, combined with the deep relationships across Asian business, finance, and government that large-scale infrastructure deployment demands.

His career has been defined by the ability to see around corners — to recognise transformative shifts in asset values before the broader market catches up. He saw it in Singapore's property market in the 1980s. He saw it in sovereign bond markets during the Asian financial crisis. And now he sees it in data infrastructure: the recognition that as the global economy digitises, data centres will become the most strategically important real estate class in the world.

As OBON's founding visionary and principal backer, Oei Hong Leong provides not only capital but strategic direction — leveraging his extensive network of relationships with sovereign wealth funds, government leaders, technology executives, and institutional investors across Asia to assemble the partnerships, secure the land, and attract the anchor tenants that transform a vision into operational reality. His involvement signals to the market that OBON is not a speculative venture but a serious, well-capitalised infrastructure play backed by one of Asia's most credible and proven investors.

◇

Five Decades

Of Strategic Infrastructure Investment

From bond trading to prime real estate to data centres — a consistent philosophy of identifying and owning the assets through which economic value must flow.

09 — Partnerships

Strategic Alliances &
Government Relations

Data centre infrastructure of the scale and geographic ambition that OBON envisions cannot be built by a single entity. It requires a carefully orchestrated ecosystem of partnerships spanning governments, technology providers, financial institutions, and telecommunications operators.

On the government front, OBON engages directly with national digital transformation agencies, special economic zone authorities, and investment promotion bodies across its target markets. In many BRI corridor nations, data centre development is a stated national priority — governments actively seek credible international partners who can deliver world-class infrastructure while contributing to local capacity building and technology transfer. OBON's BRI alignment and Oei Hong Leong's personal stature in Asian business circles provide a distinctive advantage in securing the governmental approvals, land allocations, and regulatory frameworks that large-scale data centre development requires.

Technology partnerships with leading equipment manufacturers — from server and networking hardware to cooling and power distribution systems — ensure that OBON facilities incorporate the latest technological advances while benefiting from volume procurement efficiencies. Telecommunications partnerships with regional fibre-optic network operators and submarine cable consortia provide the high-bandwidth connectivity backbone that links OBON facilities into a cohesive continental network.

10 — Sustainability

Green Data Centres &
Environmental Vision

The data centre industry consumes approximately two to three percent of global electricity — a figure that is projected to rise significantly as AI workloads proliferate. OBON recognises that long-term commercial viability and environmental responsibility are not competing priorities but inseparable imperatives.

Every OBON facility is designed to achieve industry-leading power usage effectiveness ratings, targeting a PUE of 1.2 or below across the network through advanced cooling technologies, optimised airflow management, and intelligent power distribution systems. Where climate and geography permit, OBON employs free-air cooling and leverages natural water sources for heat rejection, dramatically reducing the energy overhead associated with maintaining optimal operating temperatures.

OBON's sustainability strategy extends beyond operational efficiency to encompass renewable energy procurement, with a target of powering one hundred percent of its operations through renewable sources by 2035. This includes long-term power purchase agreements with solar, wind, and hydroelectric generators, as well as on-site renewable generation where feasible. Battery energy storage systems provide resilience while enabling participation in grid-balancing programmes that support the broader energy transition.

  • Target PUE of 1.2 or below across all facilities through advanced cooling and power optimisation
  • One hundred percent renewable energy target by 2035 through PPAs and on-site generation
  • Water-positive commitment in water-stressed regions through recycling and efficiency measures
  • Circular economy principles applied to hardware lifecycle management and facility construction
  • Transparent ESG reporting aligned with international sustainability frameworks
11 — The Future
Forward Vision

The Future of Data
Infrastructure in Asia

The next decade will witness a fundamental restructuring of how and where the world's data is processed, stored, and transmitted. OBON is positioned at the vanguard of this transformation.

Several macro trends are converging to accelerate data infrastructure investment across Asia at a pace that will reshape the global competitive landscape. Data sovereignty legislation — now enacted or proposed in virtually every major Asian economy — is compelling multinational enterprises to localise their data processing, creating captive demand for in-country data centre capacity. The rise of sovereign AI programmes, as nations from Singapore to Saudi Arabia invest billions in developing domestic artificial intelligence capabilities, demands purpose-built computing infrastructure that simply does not yet exist at sufficient scale.

The proliferation of edge computing — driven by autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, industrial IoT, and smart city applications — is creating demand for thousands of smaller, distributed computing nodes positioned close to end users. This shift from centralised to distributed architecture plays directly to OBON's corridor model, which embeds computing capacity along the geographic routes where people, goods, and data flow.

Perhaps most significantly, the geopolitical fragmentation of the global technology landscape is accelerating the emergence of distinct regional digital ecosystems. As US-China technology competition intensifies and nations across Asia seek to reduce their dependence on any single foreign technology stack, the demand for neutral, regionally governed data infrastructure grows. OBON's positioning as an Asian-led, Asian-headquartered infrastructure network — independent of the major US and Chinese cloud platforms but available to all of them — creates a unique value proposition in an increasingly multipolar digital world.

Oei Hong Leong's vision for OBON ultimately transcends the commercial. It is a bet on Asia's century — a conviction that the continent's economic ascendancy will be powered by data, enabled by infrastructure, and shaped by the visionaries who had the foresight and courage to build before the crowd arrived. In this sense, OBON is the natural culmination of a career spent identifying the assets that matter most, at the moment when they matter most, and building empires upon them.

"Asia does not need to borrow the West's digital infrastructure. It needs to build its own — and build it better. That is what One Belt One Net is for."

— Oei Hong Leong

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