STT GDC secures up to $1.37bn in green financing for Johor datacentre campus

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has secured a green financing facility of up to $1.37bn (RM5.6bn) to support the development of STT Johor, its flagship Malaysia datacentre campus in Iskandar Puteri, Johor. United Overseas Bank (Malaysia) acted as sole coordinator and mandated lead arranger for the financing, with OCBC Bank (Malaysia), Standard Chartered Bank Malaysia and CIMB Bank as mandated lead arrangers. The package includes a green loan facility for the first phase of the campus. “This financing is an important milestone in STT GDC’s continued investment in Malaysia and reflects strong confidence from our banking partners in STT Johor and the long-term fundamentals of the digital infrastructure sector,” said Nelson Lim, group chief financial officer at STT GDC. “As demand for cloud, AI [artificial intelligence] and other digital workloads grows, disciplined, long-term capital will be critical to building infrastructure that is resilient, sustainable and able to support our customers' requirements. The green loan facility reinforces our approach to integrating sustainability into the way we finance, design, build and operate our datacentres,” he added. STT Johor, located at Nusa Cemerlang Industrial Park, is slated to deliver up to 166MW of IT load once fully developed. STT GDC said the campus is being built to serve customers running cloud, AI, high-performance computing and other next-generation workloads. Johor has emerged as one of the region’s biggest datacentre hubs in recent years, attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment. Operators favour the state for its available land, power capacity, subsea cable links and proximity to Singapore. The campus also aligns with the goals of the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ) , which Malaysia and Singapore established to attract high-value investments, ease cross-border business flows and deepen economic cooperation. Darryll Sinnappa, country head for Malaysia at STT GDC, said the investment reflected the company’s long-term commitment to Malaysia and its confidence in Johor's role as a digital infrastructure hub. “The campus is being developed to support the next generation of digital infrastructure requirements, including cloud, AI and high-performance computing workloads, while contributing to Malaysia's digital economy ambitions,” he added. Beyond the facilities themselves, STT GDC has moved to build up Johor’s datacentre workforce. In April 2026, it launched talent and community development initiatives in the state, including a local talent development programme delivered with the Johor Talent Development Council (JTDC), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and datacentre training specialist EPI Group. The programme builds on a memorandum of understanding signed with JTDC in 2025, which aims to create a pipeline of skilled professionals for Johor’s datacentre sector and the wider region, in line with the JS-SEZ's objectives. The financing comes as STT GDC works to improve energy and water efficiency across its portfolio. According to the company’s latest ESG report , renewable energy accounted for 83.2% of its electricity consumption in 2025, while carbon intensity was down 70.5% against a 2021 baseline – beating its 2028 target three years early. The firm also reported a group-wide average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.44, a 13% improvement on 2020 levels, and a 41.2% gain in water usage effectiveness (WUE) over the same period. STT GDC operates in 12 markets, including Singapore, the UK, Germany, India, South Korea, Japan and Malaysia. Read more about datacentres in APAC Asia-Pacific’s datacentre development pipeline grew by 7.1GW in the first half of 2026 , with Southeast Asia now accounting for half of all capacity under construction. At Gitex Asia 2025, industry leaders discuss how the computational demands of advanced AI models are forcing a rethink of datacentre power, cooling and networking infrastructure. A joint report by Singapore government agencies and industry players details how Jurong Island will be redesigned into a highly secure, circular digital infrastructure hub by 2050. As terrestrial datacentres face severe power and cooling constraints, space-based facilities promise unlimited solar energy and low latency for AI inferencing, provided the industry can overcome challenges.