Data centre boom spreads across S-E Asia amid rising demand, Singapore moratorium

THE state of Johor, in Malaysia, and the city of Batam, in Indonesia, are becoming hot spots for data centre operators seeking space as they build up to serve South-east Asia’s growing digital needs.

Chris Street, JLL’s managing director of data centres for Asia-Pacific, said that demand has grown as enterprises in the region digitalise and move more of their workloads to the cloud. He has also observed more public cloud operators announcing tie-ups with the public sector to provide more digital services to citizens.

“I think that’s part of a maturation of digital services for their citizens. Also, the past two, three years we’ve been through, with Covid-19, just highlighted how important digital services are from a public service perspective,” he noted.