DAVAO City is preparing a proposed budget of up to ₱60 million to build a disaster-resilient centralized data center that will protect local government databases and help ensure uninterrupted public services.
Councilor Bonz Andre Militar, chairperson of the City Council’s Committee on Information Technology, said during the Pulong Pulong sa Dabawenyos at the Sangguniang Panlungsod building on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, that the proposed 100-square-meter facility will house secure servers for government records and systems.
The facility will protect municipal databases from natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other disruptions, Militar said.
The city is evaluating three potential sites for the facility, although officials have not disclosed their locations. Militar said the site must be outside disaster-prone areas, highly secured, and away from public foot traffic.
It must also be located near the City Information Technology Center (CITC), which will oversee cybersecurity operations and manage the system.
Militar clarified that the proposed facility will serve primarily as a centralized hosting and backup center for local government servers, not as an artificial intelligence (AI) computing hub.
"We will only be using precision air conditioning... without using the tubig. Pag AI, kailangan clean water and evaporated type na cooling, na kailangan niyo tons of water, so very different ang data center na for server lang sa mga agency sa AI na data center (We will only use precision air conditioning without water. AI requires clean water and evaporative-type cooling that uses tons of water, so a data center for agency servers is very different from an AI data center)," Militar said.
While the city plans to include the project in next year’s executive budget for formal funding and site acquisition, Militar said the Davao City Cybercrime Emergency Response Team will begin securing existing local government unit (LGU) servers as soon as possible.
The city has also engaged penetration testers and cybersecurity-trained personnel under the Human Resource Management Office to identify vulnerabilities and respond to potential security breaches.
"Even if magkaroon ng major calamities... mag function ang government agencies because secured servers, so that is the main purpose of our data center (Even if major calamities occur, government agencies will continue to function because their servers will be secured. That is the main purpose of our data center)," Militar said.
The proposed project builds on previously approved database security measures.
Once operational, the centralized data center will back up local government databases and help keep essential services running during network outages, cyber incidents, or disasters.
These services include transactions such as local business permit processing, which could continue even if regular systems are disrupted. GRS
