KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 30): Malaysia remains a leading market for data centre growth in Asean, with a “new, vastly improved” renewable energy scheme, due in September, expected to address solar power supply bottleneck, Macquarie Equity Research said.
Malaysia’s growth in data-centre demand lags only behind India, said the research house, citing industry experts about a 5.6 Gigawatt (GW) demand forecast over the next 10 years.
This compares with the 3GW forecast by data centre intelligence outfit DC Bytes, who put Malaysia in third spot behind India and Japan, Macquarie said in its report “Data centre power crunch persists, global signals defy scepticism”.
Two of Macquarie’s top picks for data centre play are Tenaga Nasional Bhd (KL:TENAGA), amid rising energy demand; and YTL Power International Bhd (KL:YTLPOWR) — who partnered with Nvidia to establish its regional leadership in graphics processing units (GPUs) as a service.
Malaysia is set to launch the corporate renewable energy supply scheme (CRESS) next month. A key difference from previous schemes is doing away with the 30-Megawatt (MW) project quota in a prior programme.
There have been concerns raised about the pricing involved in CRESS, namely the access charges of 25 sen or 45 sen (5.5 US cents or 9.9 US cents) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to use Tenaga’s grid.
Nonetheless, Macquarie said “we do not believe that the hyperscalers or major data centre operators are going to back away substantially from their renewable energy targets”.
Global demand persists
Globally, demand for new data centre infrastructure remains strong, underpinned by stronger-than-expected shipments of GPUs or accelerators, and servers.
Operators will continue to invest beyond what might seem rational today, so they are not out of position for the next 10- to 15 years, Maqcuarie said.
“On the infrastructure side, fear of missing out (Fomo) reigns,” Macquarie said.
Macquarie has lifted its forecasts on accelerator and server shipment, data-centre capacity, and end-power demand.
In particular, Macquarie has revised its April forecasts on accelerator shipment upwards by 7% for 2024, 26% for 2025, and 31% for 2026. Accelerator shipments are crucial for modelling data-centre demand forecasts.
This was driven by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd’s expansion of its Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) capacity, and the purchase of a fabrication facility, along with a stronger focus on artificial intelligence (AI) across the server space.
“With the new accelerator forecasts, total data-centre capacity rises from 49GW in 2023 to 164GW by 2028, or a 2023-2028 CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 27% versus our previous 2023-2028 CAGR estimate of 22%.
“Our data centre power-demand forecasts likewise rise sharply, with 2028 estimates [being] 22% higher than our April numbers. We now forecast data-centre power consumption to deliver a 23% five-year CAGR to 1,257 TWh (terawatt hours) by 2028, and doubling again before 2032,” it said.
The revisions took into account: model update, consultants, infrastructure and power generator forecasts, as well as parsing through recent policy and corporate developments.