ASEAN Beat | Environment | Southeast Asia

Whose Water Powers the Cloud? Data Centers and the Right to Water in Johor

When Singapore restricted data center growth to protect its own resources, the environmental cost shifted to Johor in neighboring Malaysia.

In February 2026, residents of Gelang Patah in Johor, Malaysia, protested outside a data center construction site. Their concern was simple: not enough water left for them. The protest was small. The problem it pointed to is not.

Johor has become Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing data center hub. Its aggregate capacity nearly doubled over the past year, reaching about 5.8 gigawatts (GW) by mid-2025. The reason is clear. Johor shares a border with Singapore, a major data center market in Southeast Asia, where over 30 international submarine optical cables converge. Due to Singapore’s planning controls and a moratorium on new data centers, global technology companies (such as Microsoft, Equinix, ByteDance and Zdata) have increasingly looked beyond the city-state and begun to target Johor for new data center development.

Data centers drink a lot. They not only consume electricity but also require significant water for cooling. Servers run 24/7 and generate heat, and water-based cooling systems can draw heavily on local supplies. When data center capacity expands rapidly, water demand can begin to compete with freshwater resources. Specifically, a medium-sized data center can use up to 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling purposes alone, an amount comparable to the annual water use of around 1,000 households. Larger, mega-sized data centers can use up to 5 million gallons per day, reaching approximately 1.8 billion gallons per year. This issue is not limited to water use at industrial facilities. Every time a user prompts an AI system, water use can accumulate behind the scenes. It has been estimated that GPT-3 needs to “drink” (i.e., consume) a 500mL bottle of water for roughly 10 to 50 medium-length responses, depending on when and where it is deployed. While one question may seem trivial, the scale of use matters: with millions of users interacting with AI systems around the clock, the digital economy’s “invisible thirst” can add up quickly.

Johor’s state government recognized the problem and acted. It classified Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centers as high........

© The Diplomat