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.