AI Data Centres, Power and Water in Malaysia

By 2035, AI data centres may use more than 30% of Malaysia's electricity. The interesting part is who sends them the bill.

Oracle, AWS, Microsoft and Google have all come.

Johor gained partly because Singapore paused new large data centres from 2019 to 2022, and the demand spilled across the causeway.

The bottleneck isn't chips. It's power.

One 600 MW park uses as much power as 730,000 to 1,460,000 homes.

Every question you ask a chatbot runs on a room of GPUs burning electricity.

YTL's Green Data Centre Park in Kulai, Johor is planned for 600 MW. Run all day, all year, that is about 5.26 billion units (kWh) a year, and it can't switch off.

Big users don't get cheaper water

Data centres in Johor pay about 1.8 times the household water rate.

Cooling a large data centre can take tens of millions of litres of water a day. Johor started tightening approvals for water-heavy projects in late 2025.

Some Johor data centres now use treated wastewater instead of tap water. That changes which water they draw, not how much evaporates in cooling.

AI jumps the queue

The race is no longer only about who builds the best AI. It's also about who still has power and water.

In February 2026, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim told Parliament that approvals for new non-AI data centres are being limited, while AI projects still get priority.

Who gets power and water, and who waits, is now a government decision.

The supply chain runs two ways

Up the chain decides who grows. Down the chain decides who gets stuck.

Most people only look up (that half is in Malaysia's AI chip stocks).

Whoever wins the AI race, the power and water bills still get paid, to companies like Tenaga and Ranhill (Ranhill SAJ supplies Johor's water). Steady demand isn't the same as a healthy company, though: their scores are below, and they differ a lot.

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