Asia Pacific's Build-Out: Scale, Sovereignty and Sustainability

Asia Pacific is shaping up to be the single largest growth story in the global data center market. Cushman & Wakefield projects the region's asset values will exceed $950 billion by 2030, requiring more than $280 billion in capital expenditure and backed by a 26.5GW development pipeline. Around 77% of that future investment is expected to land in five markets: Japan, Malaysia, Australia, India and Indonesia, with AI-ready facilities requiring up to 35% higher capex than traditional builds given their power density and cooling demands.

China continues to scale under its Eastern Data, Western Compute strategy, channelling large developments into resource-rich inland regions. RedNote is planning a 600MW campus in Inner Mongolia worth around $2.2 billion, while Envision has commissioned its Galaxy Campus in the same region, designed to scale beyond 2GW and powered directly by renewable energy through its own AI Power System. China Unicom has also landed the first direct submarine cable between Hong Kong and Cambodia, part of a wider network strategy connecting China with the rest of ASEAN.

Japan and South Korea are both leaning into scale and efficiency simultaneously. In Akita, Bitgrit and local partner S2 are developing a 500MW AI facility, with UAE sovereign wealth fund Mubadala considering funding of up to $6.3 billion. In South Korea, Alibaba Cloud has opened its third Seoul data center, lifting its regional service level agreement to 99.99%, while LG CNS is deploying direct-to-chip liquid cooling at the Samsung Data Center to support next-generation Nvidia infrastructure at densities exceeding 200kW per rack.

Singapore remains one of the region's most tightly managed markets. The Echo subsea cable, developed by Google and Meta, has now landed there after spanning more than 17,000km from California, while the city-state has provisionally allocated 200MW of new capacity across four developers on Jurong Island, with at least half of that capacity required to run on green or low-carbon energy pathways. DayOne's new biological data center prototype, built with Cortical Labs and NUS Medicine, is a reminder of just how far the innovation frontier is being pushed here.

Malaysia's own momentum is building too, with Tencent Cloud establishing its first cloud region across three availability zones in Johor. Meanwhile, India has welcomed Microsoft's fourth and largest cloud region in Hyderabad as part of a $20.5 billion infrastructure commitment; Australia's New South Wales government has introduced a 40% wind power requirement for new developments; and Papua New Guinea has launched its first AI-ready sovereign cloud platform.