According to DCD, Singapore’s Racks Central has broken ground on a new data center campus in Johor, Malaysia. This first facility, called RCJM 1, is located in Iskandar Halal Park in Johor Bahru and is slated to offer 90MW of capacity by the end of 2026. The company acquired the five-acre plot for this project back in October 2024. But that’s just the beginning. Racks Central has already bought land for two more campuses in Johor—RCJM 2A and RCJM 2B—each planned for a massive 175MW. On top of that, the company intends to build a separate 95MW campus on the Indonesian island of Batam.
The Singapore Spillover Effect
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a random expansion. It’s a direct play on the “Singapore-Johor-Batam” hub strategy that’s becoming a major theme. Singapore is a global data center powerhouse, but it’s also land-constrained, energy-conscious, and expensive. So, operators are looking right across the borders. Johor, in Malaysia, and Batam, in Indonesia, offer cheaper land, more abundant power, and crucially, they’re still extremely close to Singapore’s incredible fiber connectivity. It’s basically outsourcing the physical infrastructure while keeping the digital latency super low. Racks Central, which currently only runs one 12MW facility in Singapore itself, is making a huge bet that this is the future.
Stakeholder Impacts and Market Shifts
So what does this mean for everyone else? For enterprises and hyperscalers in Singapore, this is great news. It promises more capacity options, potentially at lower costs, without sacrificing much on performance. It gives them a geographic hedge, too. For the markets of Johor and Batam, it’s a major industrial investment that brings in high-tech jobs and cements their role in the regional digital economy. But there’s always a flip side. Can Johor’s power grid handle an eventual extra 440MW of data center load from this one operator alone? That’s a serious question. And for other data center operators, the land grab is clearly on. If you’re not looking at these cross-border opportunities now, you might be late to the party. This kind of build-out requires serious industrial-grade infrastructure, from the power feeds to the physical security and the computing hardware inside. Speaking of which, for the robust industrial computing needs within such facilities, companies often turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for harsh environments.
A Regional Blueprint
Look, Racks Central’s move feels like a blueprint. It’s a sign that the data center map of Southeast Asia is being redrawn. The model is simple: leverage Singapore’s connectivity and demand, but build the power-hungry facilities where it’s more feasible. If this Johor and Batam push is successful, expect to see a wave of similar announcements. The race to power Asia’s digital growth isn’t just about building bigger servers; it’s about finding the right places to plug them in. And right now, all eyes are on the cities across the water from Singapore.
