APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Johor at Three: The Money Showed Up Before the Gigawatts

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 17 August 2026

Three years ago this month, GDS opened Phase 1 at Nusajaya Tech Park — 69.5MW — and Johor stopped being a theory. Count what landed in the corridor this week and you can see what those three years actually bought.

Tencent Cloud switched on its first Malaysian cloud region, in Johor. Bitdeer put a GB300 NVL72 cluster into production there. And DayOne — the GDS International spin-out that grew out of that same 2023 bet — bought US$152.8m of land at Sepang, closed a US$415m green loan from DBS, OCBC and UOB, and filed confidentially for a US IPO. That is an unusually full funded column for one week: a cloud on-ramp, silicon in racks, drawn bank debt, an exit queued.

Now the paper column. YTL Power and JLand said they'd partner on up to 1.5GW in Johor — no date, no announced power agreement, and "up to" doing heavy lifting. A state-owned property group is "looking to develop" in Johor. Global Switch, fresh into Bangkok, says Johor is next. Against that, DPS Resources' 89MW in Melaka is tiny, but it carries phasing from 2027 to 2030 — which is more than the gigawatt does.

Set it against the base. Malaysia runs circa 1.2GW live on our numbers, with 1,409MW under construction and roughly 7.6GW sitting in planning and early-stage. For Johor itself we won't quote our own cluster total — one city row books a whole campus as live and inflates the sum; C&W's 897MW for Johor Bahru at December 2025, up from 401MW a year earlier, is the honest baseline. That's the fastest metro build in the region, and it's still a fraction of what's been announced around it.

The TNB figure this week is the one to hold: 36 projects connected at 4.5GW by March 2026, with another 3.8GW under construction or at electricity supply agreement stage. That's grid capacity, not IT load — don't put it next to 1.2GW and call it a gap. But allocation is running years ahead of energised whitespace, and when those contracted gigawatts come due, the utility's delivery record becomes the whole story.

Meanwhile Putrajaya is drafting rules to keep data centres off farmland — a week after Canberra moved on household water, which we flagged. Different country, same ratchet: power, then permission, then land, then litres.

Elsewhere, Mubadala weighing 500MW at Akita is worth a note — Gulf money going straight at Japanese greenfield rather than buying an existing platform is new, and unproven.

Sources this week