• Open DC is scaling its PE2 Northern Malaysia data centre in Penang from 30MW toward 100MW, with roughly 15MW energised today.
• Its Kedah border site is running close to full at 2MW, and the DE-CIX node there has yet to go live, with a full launch targeted for year-end.

Open DC has about 15MW of energised power at its PE2 campus in Bayan Lepas, managing director Wong Weng Yew said on Monday, against a Northern Malaysia data centre target the company has just raised to 100MW.

The disclosure came in response to a question that used Open DC’s own yardstick. A blog post on the company’s website on September 10 told buyers to ask operators for live, reserved and sellable capacity with energisation dates attached, and said an operator who cannot break a number into those parts is quoting announced capacity. Asked to apply that test to PE2, Wong gave the figure without hesitation. The release issued the same day carried no energised number for the site.

The carrier-neutral operator, a wholly owned subsidiary of licensed Malaysian telco Extreme Broadband Sdn Bhd (EBB Group), announced expansion plans at both of its northern sites at a media briefing in Kuala Lumpur. That telco parentage shapes the pitch, which leans on carriers and peering rather than raw capacity. PE2 in Penang is to scale from 30MW toward 100MW in phases across a 10-acre campus. D8-1 in Bukit Kayu Hitam, Kedah, is being positioned as a border peering hub for cross-border traffic between Malaysia and Indochina.

Wong said the 100MW figure was a recent decision taken in response to demand, and that the company’s claim of nearly 80% committed capacity refers to the earlier 30MW phase rather than the new target. The same September 10 post described PE2 as 10MW live and upgradable to 30MW.

A 10-year-old operator in a market of newcomers

The northern push comes as capacity concentrates in the south. Around 68% of Tenaga Nasional’s secured data centre capacity sits in Johor, where colocation vacancy has fallen to about 0.7%, figures Open DC itself cited in its September 10 post.

Open DC began in 2015 with JB1 at Menara MSC Cyberport in Johor Bahru, entering the state well before Singapore’s moratorium pushed demand across the Causeway. Wong described the company as one of the few remaining locally owned data centre operators in Malaysia, now running six facilities across four states and serving more than 300 organisations. More than 90% of its business comes from overseas customers, he said, with a recent surge in East Asian traffic.

Early financing was difficult. Wong said Malaysian banks were unfamiliar with the asset class and that one of the company’s first funders was a Singaporean infrastructure fund. He added that many local banks remain hesitant, and that alternative funders moved first.

PE2 itself is a converted factory rather than a new building, a decision Wong attributed to land scarcity in Bayan Lepas after a long search for a site.

Northern Malaysia data centre at the Thai border close to full

D8-1 currently runs at 2MW and is expanding to 4MW, Wong said, with capacity almost exhausted and a second block planned. The site is small by design next to PE2’s 30MW build and the 20MW at JB1 in Johor, reflecting a facility sold on connectivity rather than scale. The site sits in the Delapan Special Border Economic Zone within reach of four cable landing stations, two of them in Malaysia and two in Thailand at Satun and Songkhla. 

It was developed with Northern Gateway, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Minister of Finance Incorporated, after Open DC was invited four years ago to replicate its Johor internet exchange model at the northern border.

The DE-CIX node at D8-1 has not fully launched. Wong said a capacity upgrade prompted by demand had pushed the rollout back by several months, with a full launch now targeted for the end of this year or January. He declined to name tenants or connected carriers, citing non-disclosure agreements, but said there is a list of players waiting to come on.

Wong put rough numbers on the savings. Leasing a 10G link from Delapan down to Singapore would roughly cost in the region of RM100,000 a year, he said, and traffic exchanged locally at a northern internet exchange avoids that cost. He described the figures as indicative.

He described the project as building an airport hub for internet traffic. Airlines bring passenger traffic into a hub where passengers change flights, and networks do the same with traffic at an internet exchange.

Without one in the north, he said, traffic from the nearby cable landing stations has to travel up to Bangkok or down to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore before it can be exchanged.

Complementing Singapore rather than competing with Bangkok

Asked whether D8-1 is intended to compete with Thailand’s hyperscale build-out, Wong said the capacity in Kedah is nowhere near that scale and that the aim is a connectivity hub serving the wider region. Thai players connecting to the exchange would send less traffic to Singapore and pay less to do it.

Wong said the northern sites complement rather than compete with existing hubs, offering a redundancy option for a Singapore market where cable density is concentrated in a small area.

On US restrictions covering advanced chips, Wong said policy shifts always have a bearing on the business and that Malaysia has benefited, though the situation could swing either way. Open DC hedges by keeping colocation, telco, connectivity and cloud tenants alongside AI workloads rather than relying on AI demand alone, he said.

Asked whether AI-ready facilities have an easier path through approvals, Wong said Open DC was fortunate to have started before the requirement came in, adding that it is not as simple as that today. Approvals for non-AI data centres have been held back on power and water grounds, the Prime Minister confirmed in February.

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