APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

The Neoclouds Land in Indonesia

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 3 August 2026

The demand side got physical this week. CoreWeave — the GPU-cloud that a year ago had no APAC footprint at all — said it will build 360MW across three Indonesian sites. For scale: Indonesia's entire live base is about 386MW. One neocloud's opening move roughly matches everything the country has switched on to date. When EdgeConneX opened its 120MW Jakarta campus in February 2024 and people called Indonesia's hyperscale market "real," that was the whole market's coming-out. Two and a half years on, a single tenant announces almost twice that in one go.

Treat the 360MW as intent, not electrons — no sites named as built, no energisation dates. But the pattern matters. CoreWeave in Indonesia, Firmus turbocharging its Australian AI factories on a fresh funding round, Sharon AI signing a US$373m cloud deal in Australia: the neoclouds have stopped talking about APAC and started taking capacity in it. That's a different demand signal from the hyperscaler pledges — narrower, GPU-heavy, and hungrier for cheap power than for prime metros.

Which is why Indonesia. PLN spent 2026 turning itself from bottleneck into dealmaker — 1.2GW to BDx, roughly 450MW to DayOne at Batam. Contracted utility megawatts are the reason a neocloud can plausibly plan 360MW there rather than queue in Jakarta's grid. Power is still the plot; Indonesia just wrote itself a better part.

Meanwhile the paper kept piling up. DC Byte called an APAC pipeline record of 26.5GW — note that's its coverage, against the ~19.4GW Cushman counts and the ~52GW we track; different nets, same direction. Colt and RMZ floated a gigawatt-scale campus in Vizag, and 1414 Degrees signed for "up to 1GW" at a South Australian energy precinct. Both are undated ambitions — direction, not schedule.

And the constraint that undated gigawatts ignore showed its teeth. A Malaysian data-centre application was shelved after 500 households pushed back; Google's India project drew the same resistance now familiar from Texas. Permission, not capital, is what stops a project — and it's getting harder, not easier.

The quieter delivery news was in Johor, where we've camped for weeks: Empyrion topped out, Sunway bagged a US$250m build job, Gamuda took a second US$420m contract at Port Dickson. Cranes, not press releases. That's the half of the market that's actually converting.

Watch whether CoreWeave's 360MW turns up as a signed PLN allocation. Until it does, it's an ambition with a good address.

Sources this week