Malaysia tops Knight Frank’s new Southeast Asia data center index

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