ByteDance Eyes $2.4B Investment in Malaysia Data Centres, AI Hub

TikTok developer ByteDance plans to expand its data centre facilities in Malaysia with an additional investment of MYR 1.5 billion ($320 million), according to the country’s minister of investment, trade and industry.

The Chinese tech firm also hopes to make Malaysia the artificial intelligence ​​hub of the region with a proposed investment of MYR 10 billion, Tengku Zafrul Aziz said Friday in a Malay-language post on X.

Tengku Zafrul made the announcement after a meeting with TikTok vice president Helena Lersch in which they discussed the short video service’s development in Malaysia, one of Asia’s hottest data centre markets.

The further investment by ByteDance — which currently leases a Bridge Data Centres facility in Johor — is expected to help Malaysia achieve its target of growing the digital economy to reach 22.6 percent of the country’s GDP by 2025, the minister remarked. ByteDance has historically been the largest tenant of Bridge Data Centres’ China-based parent, Chindata, which was taken private by Bain Capital last year.

Johor Hotspot

ByteDance was announced as the anchor tenant of the first phase of Bridge Data Centres’ MY06 facility when it opened at Johor’s Sedenak Tech Park in 2022. The campus will ultimately extend to three buildings across 38 acres (15.4 hectares) with 110 megawatts of capacity.

Sedenak is the site of Singapore-based Princeton Digital Group’s planned 150MW data centre campus, with the Warburg Pincus-backed firm due to start operations at the 60MW first phase in the second quarter of this year.

Shanghai-based GDS, which kicked off its Southeast Asia expansion in Malaysia in 2021 with a 54MW hyperscale facility at Johor’s Nusajaya Tech Park, is also co-developing eight facilities with 168MW of capacity in Johor with partner YTL Power International.

In next-door Singapore, meanwhile, ByteDance has joined forces with Macquarie-backed AirTrunk on the Aussie operator’s second Lion City data centre, adding to the Sydney-based platform’s 78MW Loyang facility opened in December 2020.

Leading the Pack

Increased activity in Johor and Kuala Lumpur has pushed Malaysia to the top of the list of APAC’s fastest-growing data centre markets, according to a report by Cushman & Wakefield.

With a development pipeline of 1.2GW, the Southeast Asian nation can expect 600 percent growth in the next five years from its current operational capacity of 189MW, the report said.

Last December, Kuala Lumpur-based YTL Power revealed an agreement with US tech firm NVIDIA to build AI capabilities into a data centre in Johor state.

That news followed EQT-backed EdgeConneX’s September announcement that it was entering Malaysia with a plan to develop 300MW of capacity across the Kuala Lumpur area. In November, Singapore’s STT GDC joined forces with a local IT firm on a 20MW campus in the Cyberjaya tech hub as the Temasek-controlled operator’s first Malaysia project.

Note: An earlier version of this article identified Bridge Data Centres as a subsidiary of GDS. The story has been updated to show that Bridge is a unit of Chindata. Mingtiandi regrets the error.