Johor prepares for data centre hypergrowth

Johor's astounding data centre growth can be summed up in this one slide.

Johor prepares for data centre hypergrowth
Photo Credit: Paul Mah

The astounding growth of data centres in Johor can be summed up in this single slide (Below).

Was at the W.Media's Singapore Cloud and Datacenter Convention today.

In his keynote, MDEC's Wan Murdani Wan Mohamad shared about Johor's rapid growth and efforts to build sustainable data centres there.

Hypergrowth Johor

The wall of logos looks just like any other - until you take a closer look and realise these investments happened in 2021-2023.

And the list is incredible, with all top public cloud players, and attracting data centre giants from across the globe, such as:

  • GDS (China).
  • NTT (Japan)*.
  • YTL (Malaysia).
  • PDG (Singapore).
  • EdgeConneX (US)*.
  • Airtrunk (Australia).

In just 3 years. Think about that.

Here are the top data centre clusters in Johor:

  • Sedenak Tech Park (STeP).
  • Nusajaya Tech park (NTP).
  • Southern Industrial Logistic Cluster (SILC).

*Not in Johor.

Show me the numbers

Johor's IT capacity is 1,030 MW right this moment. Remember, it's just 10MW at the start of 2021.

Overall, Malaysia has experienced remarkable data centre growth. As of Dec 2023, there are:

  • 9 projects completed (635 MW).
  • 8 projects electricity supply signed (2,259 MW).
  • 50 projects at supply application stage (6,415 MW).

The lion's share of these is in Johor.

Opportunity for growth

  • Data centre supply chain: Malaysia is also working to grow the data centre supply chain ecosystem, from semiconductors, and manufacturing of data centre equipment, to cloud hyperscalers.
  • Growing renewable energy: Data centre investors are requesting renewable energy, preferably equivalent to their consumption. That's great news for the ecosystem.
  • Don't forget your (dark) fibre: Malaysia is also working to support its data centres by growing dark fibre capacity in tandem with market demand.

That's all for now. I'll examine some of Malaysia's renewable energy projects in a future post.

Just wanted to say it's wonderful catching up with so many in person - many who reached out, as well as old (cough) friends. My profound apologies if I rushed off, but you know how to reach me now!

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