Hong Kong has long been an international finance hub and a commercial and cultural gateway to Greater China thanks to its strategic location and robust infrastructure developments. Offering a low risk of natural disasters and reliable access to power and water, the metropolitan city has seen a sharp rise in international investments as developing markets throughout Southeast Asia start to mature, creating lucrative opportunities backed by ever-strengthening consumer demand.
As one of the world’s freest economies—featuring free trade, a free market system, and the free flow of capital—Hong Kong received approximately $112.7 billion in Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in 2023, maintaining the Special Administrative Region’s position as the fourth-largest recipient of FDI funds across the globe. In the same year, this geographically small city of just 428mi2 saw a record high of 4,257 startups, 26% of which were founded by non-locals.
These figures signal strong, sustaining global interest in Hong Kong’s unique opportunities.
Why Hong Kong?
With a population of 7.4 million, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region globally with a significant concentration of enterprises, networks, and IT and cloud service providers, offering a rich and diversely interwoven ecosystem for business and technology.
Earlier this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ranked Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou as the second biggest science and technology cluster worldwide for the fifth consecutive year. Last year, Cushman & Wakefield’s 23 Global Data Centre Market Comparison ranked Hong Kong as fourth overall, noting that it scored highly in connectivity, demand, service availability, and its business-friendly tax structure.
The city is home to 37 data center operators and 60 data centers strategically placed to offer businesses:
- Access to key Asian exchanges – Hong Kong’s location gives companies easy access to markets across the continent, creating opportunities for financial services, technology companies, and multinational businesses.
- Gateway to Greater China – the city’s geographic and economic proximity to the mainland makes it an ideal location to expand in and out of the country. Businesses can leverage Hong Kong’s infrastructure to navigate China’s complex regulatory landscape, ensuring secure, efficient cross-border connectivity.
- High network density – serving as one of Asia’s chief telecommunication hubs, the city hosts a great number of carriers, data centers, and network providers, offering extensive connectivity options.
With Zenlayer’s innovative digital infrastructure solutions and Equinix operating the leading regional exchange, we make expanding your business operations into Hong Kong and deploying applications and services a breeze.
Business challenges in Hong Kong
Despite Hong Kong’s numerous advantages for businesses looking to expand operations, grow users, and capture new revenue streams, deploying infrastructure in the city can be challenging due to several factors, including:
- Regulatory complexities – businesses handling sensitive data must comply with regulations that are difficult to navigate without local expertise, like China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which outlines strict requirements for data protection, storage, and cross-border transfers.
- Unreliable cross-border connectivity – due to provider fragmentation, varying infrastructure standards, and aforementioned regulatory constraints, establishing secure, high-performance networking between Hong Kong and other global regions can prove challenging.
- Scalability and compatibility issues – as enterprise operations frequently require interconnecting systems and resources between clouds, data centers, and on-prem stacks, maintaining scalability while ensuring seamless integration between platforms can be tricky.
- Supply chain slowdowns – hardware shortages and logistical delays can impact deployment timelines, hindering business development and entry into fast-moving markets.
Streamline your expansion with Zenlayer and Equinix
We join forces to help your business overcome Hong Kong’s unique challenges to streamline infrastructure deployment and accelerate market entry.
When you partner with Zenlayer and Equinix, you get the best of both worlds from our complementary service platforms, unlocking
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With our nearly 200 edge nodes covering 99% of the internet population throughout the Asia-Pacific, we offer:
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As the world’s digital infrastructure company, Equinix offers:
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Swiftly navigate Hong Kong’s regulatory complexities
As two leading infrastructure and connectivity solution providers in the region, Zenlayer and Equinix combine to give you nearly a century of experience in local compliance and regulations, empowering you to smoothy and swiftly navigate in and out of Asia’s key markets worry-free.
Equinix operates 268 data centers globally certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to facilitate data compliance anywhere you deploy. Zenlayer’s sizable presence with nearly 200 points of presence (PoPs) throughout the Asia-Pacific enables you to host critical data wherever you serve customers to comply with data localization initiatives.
When you partner with Zenlayer and Equinix, you consolidate all your critical network services down to a single contract with one point of contact, freeing up valuable time and energy while speeding up support resolution and compliant market entry.
Access high-performance, reliable cross-border connectivity
Leveraging Zenlayer’s 130+ Tbps, ultra-low latency network that covers 99% of the internet population in the Asia-Pacific, it’s easy to optimize and streamline connections to challenging nearby markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and China. Our network supports high concurrency, outperforming traditional single-layer networks to cut latency by up to 80% compared with public networks during peak hours.
Gain flexibility by taking advantage of our newly introduced port-based purchase model, which gives you the flexibility to start upgrading your network and building your ideal cloud environment with a single multi-purpose port.
Equinix hosts major marketplaces like the Chicago, London, and New York stock exchanges in its global data centers, and operates one of the most carrier-dense network hubs in Hong Kong, offering robust cross-border connectivity to major markets worldwide. The Equinix Internet Exchange (Equinix IX) lets network service providers, content providers, and enterprises connect their networks to exchange traffic directly without relying on public networks or any intermediaries.
Using our globally optimized network services, your business can quickly establish presence anywhere and create secondary sites via separate PoPs for service continuity and rapid disaster recovery.
Ensure easy scalability and integrations via a massive service ecosystem
Partnering with Zenlayer and Equinix lets you leverage our combined economies of scale and rich network of integrated service partners to minimize compatibility issues and ensure consistent service not just in Hong Kong, but across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
You can leverage Zenlayer’s 300+ direct connections to the world’s top clouds and Equinix’s extensively interconnected IBX data centers to rapidly connect global resources, standardize infrastructure management, and build cloud environments. Our high-quality local IP transit and partnerships with 10,000+ ISP, telecom carrier, and internet exchange peers help you effortlessly create your ideal high-performance enterprise network.
We also offer a suite of data center services accessible through our 300+ global PoPs that include managed hosting, custom colocation, and consultancy on site selection, customs clearance, deployment and configuration, equipment and network monitoring, and more.
Overcome supply chain slowdowns to rapidly deploy anywhere
Hardware delays can hinder expansion and restrict valuable opportunities in a fast-moving market like Hong Kong. You can mitigate supply chain slowdowns by using Zenlayer and Equinix’s digital infrastructure services to rapidly deploy worldwide, reduce reliance on physical hardware, and better align costs by turning your CapEx into OpEx.
By eliminating physical infrastructure deployment, which usually takes three to six months, you can instantly access high-performance bare metal, VMs, and edge GPUs to deploy closer to users, drastically cutting latency and optimizing data processing for improved performance, accelerated resource access, and seamless digital experiences.
Customer success in Asia with Zenlayer
Gaming industry leader optimizes large-volume data migration
A fast-growing gaming industry leader in the Asia-Pacific with a revenue of $32.8 billion in 2021 and 4,000+ employees worldwide relied on hybrid cloud deployments to handle surging demand but faced complex cross-cloud migration challenges like limited access to data center resources without proper authorization, lengthy approval processes for resource adjustments, and inefficient, time-consuming self-maintenance.
To help optimize data transfers, we designed a lightweight migration pipeline leveraging our hyperconnected private backbone, enabling the gaming company to make quick and flexible resource adjustments. Our solution simplifies deployment via Letter of Authorization (LOA) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) configurations eliminating the need for the customer to interface directly with the data center, giving them greater agility to scale on demand.
Crytocurrency platform accelerates data synchronization
A top cryptocurrency platform faced high latency across its multi-cloud infrastructure, leading to delays in transaction processing and poor user experience. As their operations span numerous global regions, the company needed a way to reduce inter-cloud latency while maintaining secure, reliable connectivity for high-frequency transactions.
We devised a Cloud Connect solution based on local Alibaba Cloud/AWS access points and their existing interconnection capacity, establishing a highly scalable, adaptable, and high-bandwidth private connection that can be scaled up to 10 Gbps per inter-cloud connection. This minimized inter-cloud latency to 2 milliseconds and reduced packet loss by 50% compared to their previous public VPN connections, improving transaction speeds and enhancing user satisfaction worldwide.
Ready to fast-track your Asia expansion towards success?
Zenlayer’s extensive network combined with Equinix’s global data center presence gives you unmatched reach and optimal network performance in Asia. Together, we offer cost-effective access to a massive ecosystem of clouds, service providers, and SaaS partners, streamlining your operations to give your business agility and a competitive edge throughout the region. You can count on our expertise to help ensure regulatory compliance and quickly capture new markets with our rapid deployment services.
Contact an expert today to streamline your expansion and accelerate your success in Hong Kong with Zenlayer and Equinix!
