GDS Holdings Ltd announced its plan to develop a hyperscale data centre in Nusajaya, Johor. The Chinese data centre firm has acquired greenfield land in the Nusajaya Tech Park immediately adjacent to Singapore, from CapitaLand. The company did not disclose the terms of the deal.
GDS said the new data centre will have a total net floor area of about 22,500 sqm, 54MW hyperscale campus on the land. The first phase of development, which will have 18MW of capacity, is expected to be completed in early 2024.
“We are very excited to take the first major step in the execution of our regionalization plan with this strategically located project in Johor. Our home market Chinese customers see great potential for digital transformation in Malaysia and the South East Asia region,” said William Huang, GDS Chairman and CEO.
The company said the site will be highly marketable to hyperscale customers due to the limited supply of new data centre capacity in the region, especially for the company’s existing Chinese customers looking to expand in Malaysia and Singapore.
Singapore has an ongoing moratorium on new data centre development, and Johor is located close to the city-state on the opposite side of the Johore Strait. In 2018 Singapore’s Keppel Data Centres Holding (KDCH) and Alpha Data Centre Fund (Alpha DC Fund) announced they were developing a hyperscale campus in Johor for a cloud customer.
Nusajaya Tech Park is spread over 210 hectares and will provide 836,100 sqm (9 million sq ft) of business space when fully built out. Current customers include manufacturer Dai-ichi Seiko Group, Telekom Malaysia, UK defense firm GKN Aerospace, and Stern-Wywiol Gruppe.
