Digital Realty enters Malaysia with a three-site campus and sidesteps the gigawatt race

The NYSE-listed operator's Cyberjaya platform is a deliberate bet on interconnection density over raw scale and Johor is already on the radar

Thirty-two megawatts is a modest number by the standards of what data centres are being built in Malaysia right now. Hyperscalers are committing to gigawatt-scale deployments across Johor and the Klang Valley. Against that backdrop, Digital Realty's newly launched Cyberjaya campus–three sites, 32MW targeted by mid-2028–looks understated.

That, its Asia Pacific head argues, is exactly the point.

Digital Realty formally inaugurated its Malaysia operations on June 8, with Minister of Digital Gobind Singh Deo in attendance. The launch brings together two operational facilities and a future development site, all within roughly 500 metres of each other in Cyberjaya.

Three sites, one connected campus

KUL10, formerly TelcoHub 1 and acquired from CSF Advisers, anchors the campus. At 1.5MW, it is the smallest of the three sites by capacity, but its value lies elsewhere. The facility hosts more than 40 network service providers and connects to three internet exchanges, including MyIX, Malaysia's national internet exchange, and the globally operated DE-CIX.

Digital Realty plans to upgrade it and nearly double its capacity to just below 3MW by the final quarter of 2027. Its designated role within the campus is as a carrier hotel, a connectivity interchange where the density of network relationships matters more than raw compute.

KUL11, 500 metres away, is the AI-facing asset. The purpose-built six-storey facility carries 15MW of IT capacity designed for AI and high-performance computing workloads. A third site, a 1.6-acre land parcel adjacent to KUL10, adds a further 14MW upon completion in mid-2028, designed for hybrid colocation.

Each facility carries its own independent fibre entry points rather than routing through a shared connection. "Every facility will have their own dedicated fibre. We make it diverse for every facility," said Billy Lee, Chairman of CSF Advisers and now Advisor for Malaysia at Digital Realty. "But the three sites will also be interconnected with dedicated fibre. It's operating three as one."

All former CSF Advisers staff have transitioned to Digital Realty employment, with headcount expected to grow as the campus scales.

Inference, not just training

The size question came up directly in a post-event interview with Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty. Her answer reframed the conversation around where AI infrastructure demand is actually heading.

"2026 is the year of inference," she said. "Training needs have almost reached maximum level. What customers need now is to use that data and inference doesn't require high power densities. It requires latency sensitivity, carrier reach, and multi-cloud connectivity."

The customer she describes is an enterprise running its own private AI environment, a financial institution, for instance, that has trained a model on proprietary data and wants to run inference and agentic workloads within a dedicated environment, connected to multiple clouds and carriers, without routing sensitive data through shared hyperscaler infrastructure.

"If I was a financial services company with my own private customer data, I don't want to put that in a large cloud AI," Nah said. "I want to train it, then do inference in my own cage. That's what we serve."

Nah was equally direct that cloud remains a core part of the campus story. "The cloud is still growing faster than AI globally. Don't mistake the 32 megawatts as too small for the cloud, it's actually perfect for the cloud, and it's highly connected."

ServiceFabric and what comes next

Digital Realty's interconnection platform ServiceFabric, which links 700-plus data centres globally, is planned for Malaysia in the second half of 2026, subject to licensing approvals. Once live, Malaysian customers gain single-fabric access to Digital Realty's worldwide network, including established hubs in Singapore and Jakarta, enabling workload deployment across markets without separate operator agreements.

In a disclosure not included in official press materials, Nah confirmed Digital Realty is evaluating sites in Johor, a geography that has absorbed significant data centre investment in recent years given its proximity to Singapore. The ambition, she indicated, is a connected corridor running from Cyberjaya southward, giving customers deployment options across multiple locations on a single platform.

"We believe we are providing a different type of connectivity platform," Nah said. "Hopefully we'll look at KL, down to Johor, down to Singapore, and really connect it so customers who want to deploy in all locations have options."