MIDF Research said Monday that Malaysia-based YTL Power International Bhd‘s 100MW artificial intelligence (AI) data center construction in Johor is on track.

The research house said in a note after its visit to the green data center park that the Johor Data Center 1 (JDC1) will have an information technology (IT) load of 48MW (facility load 72MW) where SEA Ltd will be the anchor tenant with a 32MW capacity offtake.

The first phase of 8MW under JDC1 commenced operations in May 2024.

The first block of 8MW was commissioned in May-24 and as at the time of the visit, the IT load stood at 4.5MW (facility load 6MW).

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is about 1.3, ahead of the industry average of 1.5 to 1.6.

The second block of 8MW, which is currently under testing phase, is expected to come online anytime soon (before end 2024).

The two other phases for SEA of 8MW each are expected to be commissioned by 2026 and 2027.

“There are no off takers yet for the remaining 16MW capacity, but YTL Power is in the talks with prospective clients,” MIDF said.

Security is of utmost priority, with 1,000 CCTVs in JDC1 itself, a perimeter armed with Fence Intrusion Detection System (FIDS) and security personnel round the clock, it noted.

According to MIDF, the second phase of YTL Power’s data center development will be JDC2 and JDC3, both AI data centers with IT loads of 20MW and 80MW respectively.

JDC2 is expected to be delivered to YTL AI by end January of 2025 for the installation of the NVIDIA GB200 chips.

JDC3 is still under construction and is expected to be completed by mid-2025.

The third phase or JDC6 will be a 40MW colocation data center, which has already secured an off taker and is currently being constructed according to the client’s specifications.

The whole core and shell structure is expected to be delivered by mid-2025.

It is noted that JDC1 uses air cooling but the upcoming JDC2 will see the implementation of a direct-to-chip cooling (DTC), a form of liquid cooling.

Management guided that the peak PUE is expected to be at about 1.29.

A more energy efficient method would be immersion cooling, but studies are still being conducted and YTL Power is in the talks with several server manufacturers who are still testing the method.

An immersion cooling is where the entire server is submerged into dielectric liquid.

A DTC cooling on the other hand, cools down only the chipset but the other components still require air cooling.

“We continue to like YTL Power for its strategic expansion into data center, which is progressing well,

“We also believe the firm is a potential beneficiary of the strong renewable energy (RE) growth trajectory under Malaysia’s National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR), particularly for RE exports given its presence in the Singapore power sector,” MIDF said.

YTL Power’s expansion into the data center business began in December 2021 when it acquired a 50 percent stake in Dodid Pte Ltd, which owns a 12.5MW Tier-3 data center in Singapore.

Subsequently in Apr-22, it announced its development of a 500MW data center campus in Johor, which will be powered by solar energy.

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