The jungles of Johor, the Malaysian state across the Johor Strait from Singapore, were first cleared in the 1840s by Chinese clans from Singapore seeking more space to grow black pepper. In the next century, under British rule, those pepper farms gave way to vast plantations of rubber and oil palm trees. On many of those same sites today, Johor is cultivating a new kind of cash crop: data centers meant to feed the world’s voracious appetite for artificial intelligence.
Johor’s data center boom, like the shift to growing pepper, is partly a function of scarcity in Singapore. The tiny city-state is Southeast Asia’s digital hub. But it imports both water and power, and in 2019 imposed a moratorium on building data centers because the hulking facilities were guzzling water and consuming 7% of Singapore’s electricity. Investors and operators of data centers flocked to neighboring Malaysia, where land is cheap, energy is abundant, and the government is eager to jump-start development of the nation’s digital economy.
