APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Buy The Power, Buy The Building, Or Wait For A Yes

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 28 September 2026

Japan's largest power producer put its name to a $15bn data centre build with Dell this week. Hold that against September 2024, when Kansai Electric's move into this business was a 36MW Osaka joint venture with CyrusOne. Two years from minority partner on 36MW to lead name on the biggest single Japanese number we've logged.

No megawatts and no date came with it, which is the part to sit with — an undated $15bn is an ambition, not a schedule. For scale, it's roughly the size of AWS's ¥2.26tn (~$15.2bn) Japan cloud pledge from January 2024, and it lands in a market with circa 1.9GW live and 1,451MW genuinely under construction. Our Japan read has interconnection queues and land gating a third or more of the planned pipeline. That's why a generator leading a build is worth watching: it owns the thing everyone else is queueing for. Mitsubishi Estate's $9.3bn for up to 2,500MW in July was property money. This is electrons.

Amazon spent the week buying past the same queue from the other end. In Hong Kong it agreed to take two built iTech towers off Grand Ming for at least HK$2.18bn — finished floorspace in a metro with circa 420MW live and only 127MW under construction. Hong Kong barely had a second-hand market before Bain paid about $275m for two Fanling assets in 2025; now a hyperscaler is bidding into it. In Selangor it paid RM316.84m for roughly 184,000 sq m at Sepang, completing Q2 2027 — zoned land, outside Johor, the Google Port Dickson playbook.

Then the other side of the ledger. Goodman pulled its 90MW Lane Cove application and axed a $1.2bn Sydney campus after local opposition, while still pushing an 80MW conversion of the old ABC studios. Ninety megawatts is noise against Sydney's 2.1GW under construction and 3.7GW planned. The signal is that the objection worked — in the metro with APAC's largest build book, and from an operator carrying 26MW live against a roughly 1.6GW live-plus-pipeline book. Paper that thin needs councils to keep saying yes.

West Java's governor ordered BDx to stop work on the 640MW Jatiluhur campus we flagged last week: permits not issued, environmental assessment outstanding. Groundbreaking isn't permission. Thailand means to finalise licensing by mid-October with 801MW already under construction against circa 190MW live, and Australia's grid mandates now have Google and Microsoft arguing for flexibility while the Northern Territory argues against them outright.

Smaller but telling: Globe is committing $1bn to AI and data centres next year and PLDT's VITRO wants up to P24.2bn in a REIT IPO — public-market money for a market with circa 110MW live.

Sources this week