Malaysian data centres reached 9.3% of national electricity consumption in the second week of August, against a 7% average for the year to date, the Energy Commission's chief executive Siti Safinah Salleh said in a report published on 8 September1. The regulator attributes the jump to hotter weather lifting cooling load.
The Energy Commission regulates Malaysia's electricity supply industry and publishes the national consumption figures, so this is a measurement rather than a forecast. A share that moves with the weather behaves nothing like the flat draw grid planners were sold. It means the reserve margin, the spare generation held above expected demand, has to cover data-centre cooling in the same hot week as everyone else's air conditioning.
Johor carries most of that load, on an outside estimate rather than a regulator's count. Wood Mackenzie put the state's data-centre maximum demand at about 3.8 GW, roughly 1.5 times Johor's own current electricity demand, and at about 51% of peninsular Malaysia's total data-centre maximum demand, in a report published on 18 June, before this window opened2. Those two figures are the consultancy's estimates and not the Commission's measurements, and they cannot be quoted under the regulator's name.
The Commission's own projections run further out, with data centres taking 31% of peninsular demand by 2035 and Malaysia needing about 9 GW of new gas-fired capacity by 20323. Operators in Johor have chosen to argue their resource case on water: ZDATA said in July that its facility there runs solely on treated wastewater. The electricity number is the one the regulator has now written into the national accounts, where it can be tracked week by week whether the industry engages with it or not.
