Description
The Kuala Lumpur data centre market is poised for significant growth despite is nascent stage of maturity relative to other tier 2 APAC markets. This is driven by constraints in Singapore and the rise of Johor as an alternative data centre hub which has translated into the overall Malaysia market being a primary beneficiary of redirected investments. Singapore, a traditional data centre hub in Southeast Asia, faces land and energy limitations, prompting a moratorium on new data centre developments from 2019 to 2022. This has shifted hyperscaler investment focus to Malaysia, with Johor emerging as the fastest-growing data centre market in the region due to its proximity to Singapore, abundant land, and competitive costs. Kuala Lumpur benefits from this spillover as a complementary hub, and with its established infrastructure, installed base of enterprise customers, and strategic initiatives like the Kuala Lumpur Smart City Master Plan 2020-2025. In 2025, this market is projected to be worth USD $300 million and projected to reach $1.1 billion by 2030. The projected five-year CAGR for 2025-2030 is 31%.
The development of AI infrastructure across the APAC region is now starting to materialize. AI training deployments will likely land initially in the Japan and Australia markets in the near term and Kuala Lumpur is primarily going to attract AI inference and cloud infrastructure workloads for now. As AI inference requirements grows overtime, Kuala Lumpur will likely be an attractive hub for these deployments given its proximity to both Singapore and Johor.
While enterprise demand has historically driven the initial stage of growth for the Kuala Lumpur data centre market, it is clear that future demand will likely materialize from both the US and Chinese hyperscale platforms. Alibaba Cloud is the only hyperscaler with a confirmed operational cloud region in Kuala Lumpur as of March 2025, having been active since at least 2022. AWS and Microsoft are on the cusp of launching their regions, with both AWS and Microsoft looking to bring online their cloud regions. Google’s cloud region is still in the planning phase, with no confirmed operational date, reflecting a slower rollout compared to its peers. Structure Research expects there will continue to be a steady stream of hyperscale-grade demand for colocation and built-to-suit capacity in the Kuala Lumpur market over the next five years.
A key dynamic impacting the Kuala Lumpur data centre market is the hyperscaler’s deployment strategy of adopting a mix of colocation and built-to-suit leasing supplemented by self-build data centres. Both Microsoft and AWS have self-build data centres under development in the Cyberjaya cluster, while Google’s is located in the northern part of Kuala Lumpur that was announced in 2024.
This report takes an in-depth look at the Kuala Lumpur data centre market that includes both the leasing and self-build capacity. We track the market’s size and rate of growth while drilling into the inventory situation and demand profile. A complete picture of demand, supply, and absorption is provided, along with a detailed mapping of cloud infrastructure and interconnection nodes across the market. New and planned builds that are in the pipeline are tracked and broken out with granularity across the different clusters. There is also a particular focus on both leasing and self-build activity by the top hyperscale cloud platforms given they are expected to account for a meaningful share of demand moving forward.
This report is an excellent resource for any operator, investor, or end user (service provider or enterprise) that is looking to understand and project the data centre.
Read the PDF report preview HERE.
