Malaysia’s appeal as an investment destination for data centers in Southeast Asia tops the inaugural list of Knight Franks’ newly launched index, the Knight Frank SEA-5 Data Centre Opportunity Index. The proprietary tool assesses the data center ranking of five Southeast Asian markets — Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam — based on factors such as recent take-up and supply figures, existing and future cloud availability zones, subsea fiber connectivity, population sizes, GDP growth, and ease of doing business for foreign investors.
Malaysia’s 113 megawatts of take-up in 2022 was a four-fold increase over the next highest market of Thailand, which saw 25 MW of take-up, and represents domination over the rest of the market. Much of this take-up accounts for the growth in Johor, Malaysia, although Kuala Lumpur, which has also reported double-digit take-up figures for the past three years, has also contributed to this. Malaysia leads the five Southea
