According to Savills, Singapore's established data centre ecosystem continues to play an important role in Southeast Asia even as constraints on land and power contribute to rapid capacity expansion in neighbouring markets.

New analysis from the Savills Impacts global thought leadership programme shows that while the US, followed by China, remains the dominant data centre market globally by sheer capacity, Malaysia has scaled the most rapidly – by 132% – over just two years. Johor Bahru, just across the causeway from land- and power-constrained Singapore, has contributed to Malaysia’s data centre IT power growth. It now offers 1,310 MW of live capacity.

Indonesia (+66% since 2024), India (+35%) and Australia (+32%) have also grown rapidly to meaningful scale over the same time frame, according to Savills analysis of data from DC Byte, while Saudi Arabia, The Philippines and Finland have grown rapidly but capacity remains at an overall small scale globally.

Looking ahead, Savills' new Power and Place Index ranks Johor Bahru 18th globally for future data centre development potential. The Index assesses 54 markets based on the physical and delivery constraints that increasingly determine where data centres can be built, including power, water and climate.

Alan Cheong, Executive Director, Research & Consultancy, Savills Singapore, commented: "Although Singapore doesn’t feature heavily in the heat map for data centre development, it does not mean that it is out of the running. Operators of data centres who value data security and reduced latency to mission critical executions are pinning for a permit to build in Singapore. However, given the land and resource constraints Singapore faces, only the cream of the crop will get an allocation to build."

Globally, the United States is unsurprisingly the dominant global market by data centre capacity, at around 50GW of live IT power - growing 19% since 2024 - followed by China. Japan, the UK, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands are also now large and mature markets, with meaningful absolute scale but more modest recent growth amidst rising grid access constraints. Savills says that these established ecosystems, with their connectivity and customer depth, will ensure they remain crucial global markets, even as the build-out of new data centres becomes harder due to various cost, land, grid capacity and development constraints.

Paul Tostevin, Head of Savills World Research, comments: "No one will be surprised the US remains the world’s leader in data centre capacity, with other mature markets following. Some of the interesting trends are among smaller nations that are offering alternatives as developers increasingly look to follow where there is available capacity, rather than demand alone. The relative growth of countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia in just a couple of years has been extraordinary, with another tranche of countries not far behind, however, these nations must now look to balance the issues which are sometimes constraining growth in the more mature markets: namely grid access, energy costs, land and water availability and environmental impact.”

Chart - Data centre capacity growth

Chart - Top ten fastest growing data centre markets