APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Vietnam Lost Four Cables. That's the Week's Real Capacity Number.

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 31 August 2026

Vietnam lost four of its six subsea cables this week, taking out roughly 30% of the country's international capacity. Set that against the build book: our base carries Vietnam at circa 60MW live with 443MW under construction — seven times the installed base — and another 1.4GW of planned and early-stage behind it. In May 2024, STT GDC and VNG formed a JV for a 60MW Ho Chi Minh City facility, the first big international-platform bet on the country. Last week STT GDC backed out of its Vietnam project. The reporting doesn't link the two and neither will we. But if you are underwriting Vietnamese capacity, the cable map now sits in the model next to the grid queue.

The rest of the week's cable news was capital, not failure. AWS unveiled a new trans-Pacific route linking the US and Japan. Firmus committed US$300m to SUBCO's APX East. SK Telecom launched SK Horizon, folding AI data centres and subsea infrastructure into one venture, and Japan put ¥100bn behind cable ships last week. We have spent three years counting megawatts. Routes are being counted now.

The funded column was Japanese and it was an exit. Keppel DC REIT is paying about US$1.05bn for majority stakes in two Tokyo data centres. In December 2024 the same REIT closed a $707m Tokyo purchase — twenty-one months on, the ticket is half again as large. Japan holds 1,685MW under construction, second only to Australia's 2,275MW, with Greater Tokyo running circa 1.1–1.2GW live on external baselines. The REIT bid is the release valve for all that development capital, and it is still open. Alongside it, KKR and Singtel completed the STT GDC purchase agreed on 4 February at a S$13.8bn enterprise value — the largest APAC deal since AirTrunk, and now actually closed. Deals that close deserve saying so.

On the other side: DayOne and TNB will explore up to 1.5GW of onsite generation for a planned Selangor campus. No delivery year, no signed supply agreement in the reporting — a study, whose headline number is larger than everything Malaysia has running today. Two weeks ago it was YTL Power and JLand with an undated 1.5GW in Johor. Worth flagging while we're here: TNB counts 36 projects and 4.5GW connected as of March 2026, our Malaysian base is circa 1.2GW live. Grid MW and IT MW are different units and shouldn't be blended.

Nikkei ran the Asia-wide backlash piece this week; AirTrunk's boss called it the biggest hurdle last week. Permission was already scarce. Now add the wire.

Sources this week