Malaysia is Betting on Data Centers To Boost Its Economy (apnews.com) 10
Malaysia is aggressively expanding its data center capacity, positioning itself as Southeast Asia's fastest-growing market with planned investments exceeding $31 billion in the first 10 months of 2024, triple the amount from 2023.
The country's southern Johor province is set to host at least 1.6 gigawatts of data center capacity, up from nearly zero in 2019. Twenty-two mostly foreign data centers already occupy 21 hectares, with more under construction. The push comes as neighboring Singapore paused new data center construction in 2019 due to resource constraints.
Some experts are warning the expansion could strain Malaysia's power and water resources, with data center power demand potentially reaching 5 gigawatts by 2035 - more than half the country's current renewable capacity. The facilities, operated by companies including Microsoft, Equinix and China's GDS Holdings, primarily service East Asia, China and Europe rather than domestic users.
The country's southern Johor province is set to host at least 1.6 gigawatts of data center capacity, up from nearly zero in 2019. Twenty-two mostly foreign data centers already occupy 21 hectares, with more under construction. The push comes as neighboring Singapore paused new data center construction in 2019 due to resource constraints.
Some experts are warning the expansion could strain Malaysia's power and water resources, with data center power demand potentially reaching 5 gigawatts by 2035 - more than half the country's current renewable capacity. The facilities, operated by companies including Microsoft, Equinix and China's GDS Holdings, primarily service East Asia, China and Europe rather than domestic users.
Power generation source is the concern (Score:2)
I'm all for countries trying to step up and provide DCs, but it feels climatically irresponsible if they do so while they have non-renewable power.
According to https://www.gso.org.my/ [gso.org.my] , they are still mostly still on coal and gas.
Can we eat first? (Score:2)
I'm all for countries trying to step up and provide DCs, but it feels climatically irresponsible if they do so while they have non-renewable power.
According to https://www.gso.org.my/ [gso.org.my] , they are still mostly still on coal and gas.
I'm all for climate change and such, but can we eat first?
Climate change is the responsibility of the superpowers. It's things like Commonwealth Fusion [cfs.energy] and Verdox [verdox.com] that will generate solutions that will allow us to reverse climate change.
(Even 10 years ago the best method for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere was by distillation, which was/is energy intensive. I've done a fair bit of gas chemistry in my career and was surprised when the Verdox system was announced publicly.)
Climate change will not come from
Re: (Score:2)
Data centers have a dirty secret (Score:2)
No jobs... They just suck power (Score:2)
This is odd.
Data centers don't provide many jobs once they are built. Just a few peons to plug and unplug things when something breaks.
The real work of data centers is done remotely, not necessarily near the data center.
OTOH, they suck vast amounts of power leading to shortages.
Re: (Score:1)
Yea but they also harvest vast amounts of data and once that data is inside your country, you can effectively do whatever you want with it.
One day far in the future... (Score:2)
...an exploratory vessel approaches the third rocky planet from an aging star. The planet appears to have a large surface water supply, though most of that water seems to be suspended in a permanent cloud layer that is only sporadically visible behind the large solar arrays that were obviously placed there by some intelligence to gather power from the starlight, still in abundance outside the deep and thick layers of clouds.
"Away the probes," explorapod Ximinir admonishes the ship's systems. "Find surface c
No jobs (Score:2)
Why use data centers in Malaysia? (Score:2)
Its near the Equator. Its hot as hell there, and data centers require A/C.
Why isn't Canada building global data centers? They have huge hydro-electric facilities, the CANDU nuclear reactors, and the Arctic permafrost region is natural A/C.