AirTrunk Enters Malaysia With 150MW Data Centre Project in Johor Bahru

AirTrunk on Thursday announced the development of its first data centre in Malaysia, a hyperscale facility in Johor Bahru with more than 150 megawatts of planned capacity.

AirTrunk’s JHB1 campus will span 10.3 hectares (25.5 acres) at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula and provide a strong domestic and international connection to regional technology hubs like nearby Singapore, the Sydney-based firm said in a release.

Driven by rapidly increasing cloud adoption in Southeast Asia, JHB1 will be AirTrunk’s ninth data centre overall, taking the APAC-focused platform to more than 1.35 gigawatts of capacity.

“It is an exciting time for our business as we announce a new data centre in a new country with a large anchor tenant,” said AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda, who did not disclose the tenant’s name or the project’s cost.

Green Features

The initial phases of JHB1 will provide 50MW of capacity, with construction starting soon and due for completion in 2024, AirTrunk said.

The project will be funded through sustainability-linked green loans and include a number of eco-friendly features, including 5MW of rooftop solar panels and a “landmark cooling solution” that uses a mix of indirect evaporative cooling and direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

The liquid cooling technology will enable AirTrunk’s customers to deploy high density-racks, reducing energy consumption by up to 20 percent by the firm’s estimate.

“With its flexible designs and innovations driving energy and water efficiencies in tropic climates, JHB1 will be the most sustainable data centre in Malaysia,” said Damien Spillane, AirTrunk’s chief technology officer. “In line with our Net Zero by 2030 target, we are working with our customers to source renewable energy to match electricity consumption at the data centre.”

Growing Platform

AirTrunk’s latest milestone comes two months after the firm broke ground on its second hyperscale data centre in Japan, a 110MW facility dubbed TOK2. The campus in western Tokyo will complement AirTrunk’s existing 300MW TOK1 serving eastern Tokyo.

After powering up its first Asian data centres in Hong Kong and Singapore in December 2020, AirTrunk’s platform has grown to include nine regional projects, including four in its native Australia.

Joining AirTrunk in southern Malaysia are rivals Equinix, which last November announced a $40 million hyperscale facility in Johor state as its maiden project in the country, and Shanghai-based GDS Holdings, which has hooked up with YTL Power International to co-develop 168MW of data centre capacity across eight individual facilities at a campus in Johor state.

YTL Power’s digital infrastructure arm, Singapore-headquartered YTL Data Center Holdings, is developing 500MW of capacity at the solar-powered campus in the Iskandar region surrounding Johor Bahru to supply rack space to operators in the country and across the border in the Lion City.