NEXTDC opens KL1 in Kuala Lumpur, its first international data centre

NEXTDC has opened KL1 Kuala Lumpur, a A$1 billion (RM2.8 billion) Tier IV data centre in Petaling Jaya — the ASX-listed operator’s first facility outside Australia. The 65-megawatt site is built for AI and high-performance computing workloads and puts the Brisbane-based company into the contest for Southeast Asian cloud and enterprise demand.

KL1 sits in the Klang Valley, about 15 kilometres west of the capital. It spans 18,500 square metres of technical space and broke ground in June 2023. In an ASX filing in May 2025, NEXTDC disclosed it had already contracted 10 megawatts of customer capacity — roughly 15 per cent of the planned IT load — before the site went live. The company said it would bring additional capacity online in phases as customer demand grows.

“We are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and AI is redefining the requirements of critical infrastructure,” chief executive Craig Scroggie said at the launch on Wednesday. “The challenge is no longer access to technology, but the ability to deploy it at speed, at scale, and within sovereign governance frameworks.”

It is a long way from Brisbane.

The launch drew senior Malaysian government figures, as Kuala Lumpur works to establish itself as a regional digital infrastructure player. Minister of Digital Gobind Singh Deo called the RM2.8 billion commitment evidence of “global investor confidence in our digital ecosystem” and said it would help “ensure that Malaysia remains at the forefront of the global value chain.”

Selangor Chief Minister Amirudin Shari, whose state government shepherded the project through planning approvals, pointed to the speed of the build. Since the June 2023 groundbreaking, he said, NEXTDC had “given birth to KL1, the first Tier IV data centre in Malaysia, right in the heart of Petaling Jaya in Selangor.”

KL1 lands in a Southeast Asian market that has drawn years of sustained investment from global operators. Singapore’s de facto cap on new data centre construction — partially loosened in 2022 but still tied to strict sustainability conditions — pushed hyperscalers and colocation providers into neighbouring markets. The most visible beneficiary has been Johor in southern Malaysia, where Equinix, AirTrunk, and YTL have all announced large-scale builds. NEXTDC chose the Klang Valley instead, closer to Kuala Lumpur’s enterprise and government customers than to the Singapore overflow corridor.

Tier IV certification, the highest rating under the Uptime Institute’s classification, means the facility is designed for fault tolerance with fully redundant power and cooling. That has become table stakes for AI training workloads, which can run for weeks at a stretch and cannot absorb unplanned downtime.

The Brisbane-headquartered company listed on the ASX in 2010 and now operates 13 data centres across Australia. Scroggie has previously named Tokyo and Auckland as possible future markets, though KL1 is the only confirmed overseas site so far.