APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Anthropic Signed A Lease. Everything Else This Week Was The Bank Saying Maybe.

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 14 September 2026

Anthropic signed its first Australian data centre lease this week. We haven't seen the size or the term, and that matters less than the fact of it. In early July the story was Anthropic shopping for up to 1.4GW of Australian capacity, after auditioning operators for an initial 500MW. A shopping list is a number. A lease is something a lender can price. Two months from one to the other is quick by this industry's standards.

Hold the scale while you read it. Australia's entire live base was 664MW in 2015. It is circa 1.6GW today, with 2.3GW under construction — the largest build book under way in APAC, ahead of Japan's 1.7GW, a lead Japan held until mid-2026. Against a total Australian pipeline of about 11.5GW, roughly seven times what's running, a single tenant at 1.4GW would be a tenth of the book.

The other end of the deal got harder this week. S&P says Malaysian banks are tightening data centre lending and operators may have to go to dollar bonds instead. NEXTDC raised A$1.1bn in convertible notes — the same company the market marked down in June on cost, power and funding doubts. Goodman pulled in $455m for its Hong Kong partnership. The AFR billed Firmus as Australia's most capital-hungry company ahead of its listing. Equity is still abundant. The terms are getting picky, and the structure of the money tells you more about delivery than the megawatt number does.

Which is why Bitdeer's ten-year, 65.1MW Malaysian contract is worth more than its size suggests. When GDS opened Nusajaya Tech Park Phase 1 in Johor in August 2023, that one 69.5MW building was the news that made Johor real. Malaysia's live base then was about 600MW on our back-cast; it runs circa 850–900MW now, with 1.4GW under construction. Data centres took 44% of all investment into Malaysia in the first half. A decade-long offtake in that market beats another memorandum.

One conflict worth flagging rather than smoothing: TNB says 36 projects representing 4.5GW were completed and connected as of March 2026, while our own series has Malaysia's live IT load under a gigawatt. Those are different meters — grid capacity against IT MW — and nobody should quote both in the same sentence.

The Philippines unveiled a $34.4bn AI infrastructure masterplan with no delivery schedule we can see. It sits against 107MW live and 45MW under construction. That's an ambition, not a timetable.

And Thailand's freeze on 49 builds, which we flagged last week, is now partly traced to a diesel spill at a Bangkok facility. Prosaic cause. Expect prosaic rules.

Sources this week