Digital Realty Enters Malaysia With Cyberjaya Data Centre Buy

Digital Realty has agreed to buy a data centre in the Cyberjaya tech city near Kuala Lumpur, marking the US giant’s entry into Malaysia.

TelcoHub 1 is an operational 1.5-megawatt facility with adjacent land that can support a further 14MW of IT load, NYSE-listed Digital Realty said Monday in a release. The campus extends the group’s PlatformDIGITAL co-location offering into another Southeast Asian market after the business made its Indonesia debut last year with the takeover of two Jakarta assets.

Malaysia’s data centre sector is playing an increasingly important role in the region’s digital ecosystem as infrastructure requirements evolve towards greater resilience, interconnection and readiness for more complex workloads, said Serene Nah, managing director and head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty.

“Our entry into Malaysia will bring our global platform, operational expertise and long-term investment approach into the local market, support the country’s digital ambitions, and help to shape how regional infrastructure is built for the future,” Nah said.

Dark Fibre Hub

TelcoHub 1 is considered one of Malaysia’s largest dark-fibre interconnect hubs, with more than 6,000 cores of regional and long-haul fibre landing at the facility, according to Digital Realty. The network-dense data centre hosts more than 40 service providers, with access to key platforms such as AWS, Google, MyIX and DE-CIX ASEAN.

The Austin-based trust is taking ownership of TelcoHub 1 through the acquisition of Malaysian data centre operator CSF Advisers, led by chairman and CEO Billy Lee, for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026.

CSF’s leadership team and more than 40 staff will join Digital Realty, which plans to expand the local team over time to support future growth and operational scale.

“Malaysia is currently in a sustained scale-up phase for digital infrastructure, with total data centre capacity projected to grow from 1.26 gigawatts in 2025 to 2.53GW by 2030,” Lee said. “Continued expansion is fuelled by rising demand for cloud services, AI acceleration, robust connectivity infrastructure and supportive government policies.”

Digital Realty has 19 data centres across Asia Pacific, where the REIT manages more than 300MW of capacity in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. 

Hyperscalers Expand

Last year saw some of the world’s top hyperscalers grow their footprint in Malaysia, with a data centre unit of Microsoft buying its fourth land plot in Malaysia’s Johor state in January.

In 2024, US-based Microsoft announced that it would invest $2.2 billion over four years to support Malaysia’s digital transformation, representing the company’s single largest investment in its 32-year history in the country.

Search and AI giant Google also continues to expand in Malaysia, with the company last May buying a data centre site in the coastal city of Port Dickson for MYR 455.2 million (then $105.4 million). Developer Gamuda Bhd sold the 389 acre (157 hectare) plot to Google affiliate Pearl Computing Malaysia and is overseeing the MYR 1 billion development of the project.