Nikkei Asia's October 9 letter carried a Cushman & Wakefield chart of Asia-Pacific data center capacity as of June 2026. Each bar is electricity the halls can draw, measured in gigawatts. One gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. The dark part of a bar is capacity already running. The middle part is under construction. The gray part is still planned. Johor is the longest bar. Greater Tokyo, Sydney, Mumbai, and Bangkok follow. Singapore's bar is mostly capacity that is already running, with a short planned section.
Cushman published the regional total on August 7. The pipeline reached 26.5 gigawatts after builders added 7.1 gigawatts in six months. Of that book, 4.8 gigawatts are under construction and 21.7 gigawatts are planned. Operators also switched on about 1.4 gigawatts of new halls. Empty colocation space still shrank, from 10.9 percent of capacity in the second half of 2025 to 10.3 percent. Running capacity across the region was 15,135 megawatts (Cushman & Wakefield, 2026a; Cushman & Wakefield, 2026b).
Johor has 602 megawatts under construction
Johor held 4,198 megawatts in total in the first half of 2026. That splits into 1,110 megawatts running, 602 under construction, and 2,486 planned. Construction rose from 315 megawatts in the prior half. EdgeProp reported those splits from the Cushman update. Malaysia led the region with 1,039 megawatts under construction, and Johor is more than half of that national figure (EdgeProp, 2026).
Thailand had 859 megawatts under construction, and Cushman's city table puts that work in Bangkok. Bangkok had 134 megawatts running, so the construction book is several times the halls already open. Sydney's pipeline was 2,134 megawatts, with 917 running. Mumbai had 890 running and a 1,726-megawatt pipeline. Jakarta's pipeline was 1,699 megawatts, with 395 under construction. Cushman said Australia, India, Japan, and Malaysia are on track to pass 2 gigawatts of running capacity by 2028.
Andrew Green, who leads the data center group for Asia Pacific at Cushman & Wakefield, called this "a phase of rapid, power-constrained execution." He said expansion is moving toward markets that can provide power at scale. That matches the chart. Singapore, the old cable hub, has a short planned section. Johor, next door, has the long one.
Five countries hold about $215 billion of the build
On August 25, Cushman estimated more than $280 billion in capital spending to support the pipeline through 2030. About 77 percent of that money, roughly $215 billion, falls in Japan, Malaysia, Australia, India, and Indonesia. Japan alone is close to a quarter of the regional total. Cushman expects the value of operating data centers in the region to pass $950 billion by 2030. It also expects total capacity to rise 2.7 times by then, compared with 2.6 times in the Americas and 2.3 times in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Customers had already reserved about 7.8 gigawatts of future capacity. Reservations rose 115 percent from a year earlier (Cushman & Wakefield, 2026b).
The $280 billion is what Cushman thinks builders will need to spend. It is an estimate of future construction, and a government approval is an earlier step than a finished hall. The Diplomat, citing Malaysia's investment authority, reported about $96 billion of data center and cloud projects approved from 2021 through the first quarter of 2026, including $24 billion in the first half of 2026. Thailand's Board of Investment logged about $24 billion of digital-industry applications in 2025, across 151 projects, mainly data centers (The Diplomat, 2026).
AirTrunk is one operator plan large enough to see inside the Japan share. Robin Khuda, the chief executive, told Nikkei Asia on October 7 that the Blackstone-backed company plans to raise its Japan investment from about $9 billion committed now to as much as $30 billion over five years. He said customers will pay a premium to put capacity in Japan. AirTrunk also closed a $1 billion loan for liquid cooling at its TOK1 campus in Inzai, east of Tokyo, with the first cooled capacity aimed at January 2028. The company has about 530 megawatts in Japan today and is aiming past 1 gigawatt (Nikkei Asia, 2026; Data Center Dynamics, 2026).
Ask for the power date before you pick the city
On September 3 I wrote about U.S. towns freezing data center permits over household power bills and water. Electric Choice had 261 restrictions in force as of September 1. The Asia-Pacific chart shows builders placing the next halls in markets that can still connect a large load. Johor, Bangkok, Mumbai, and Greater Tokyo are doing that work in public numbers.
If you are placing a training job or a cloud region, ask the operator for the date the utility has committed the electricity, the megawatts already under construction, and the megawatts still planned. Johor's 602 megawatts under construction are the halls with crews on site. The 2,486 megawatts planned still need a power date and a build. AirTrunk's $9 billion is the Japan commitment on the books. The $30 billion is the five-year plan Khuda described to Nikkei.
Ask your cloud and colocation suppliers which Asia-Pacific site has a utility power date in the next 24 months. Then ask how many of those megawatts are under construction in Johor, Greater Tokyo, Mumbai, or Bangkok, and what slips if the planned portion waits on the grid.
Works Cited
Cushman & Wakefield. "Asia Pacific's Data Centre Development Pipeline Reaches Record 26.5GW in H1 2026." Cushman & Wakefield, 7 Aug. 2026a, www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/australia/news/2026/08/asia-pacifics-data-centre-development-pipeline.
Cushman & Wakefield. "APAC Data Centre Asset Values Projected to Exceed US$950 Billion by 2030, Requiring US$280 Billion in New Capital Investment." Cushman & Wakefield, 25 Aug. 2026b, www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/singapore/news/2026/08/dcil.
Data Center Dynamics. "AirTrunk Plans Additional $1bn Investment in Data Center Campus in Inzai, Japan." Data Center Dynamics, 7 Oct. 2026, www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/airtrunk-plans-additional-1bn-investment-in-data-center-campus-in-inzai-japan/.
EdgeProp. "Johor Leads Apac Data Centre Boom as Malaysia Tops Construction." EdgeProp.my, 27 Aug. 2026, www.edgeprop.my/content/1917257/johor-leads-apac-data-centre-boom-malaysia-tops-construction-%E2%80%94-cw.
Nikkei Asia. "Australia's AirTrunk to Triple Japan Data Center Investment to up to $30bn." Nikkei Asia, 7 Oct. 2026, asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-picks/interview/australia-s-airtrunk-to-triple-japan-data-center-investment-to-up-to-30bn.
The Diplomat. "The Global Data Center Boom Has Arrived in Southeast Asia." The Diplomat, 29 Sept. 2026, thediplomat.com/2026/09/the-global-data-center-boom-has-arrived-in-southeast-asia/.
Bellamkonda, Shashi. "Towns Are Freezing Data Center Permits Over Power Bills and Water." shashi.co, 3 Sept. 2026, www.shashi.co/2026/09/towns-are-freezing-data-center-permits.html.
