BW Digital to launch Batam's largest data centre

The largest data centre in Batam is going live within the next six months, and it will be capable of supporting the latest Nvidia GPUs.

Here's what I learned at BW Digital's event earlier today.

NDP1 data centre

The BW Digital Campus at the Nongsa Digital Park (NDP) is built for cloud and AI workloads. It will be ready for service with 24MW of IT capacity for its first phase by Q1 2026.

Called NDP1, the campus consists of two buildings with up to 36 data halls, delivering 120MW IT capacity in total. It follows Nvidia's AI factory guidelines and offers slab-to-slab height of 7-metres and 20kN/m² of floor loading.

NDP1 will support 20kW to 40kW racks with air cooling, or up to 140kW with direct liquid cooling (DLC) supporting either direct-to-chip or immersion cooling. In a nutshell, they're flexible.

Direct line to Singapore

Data centres are useless without strong network connectivity. BW Digital has it all planned with at least two subsea cables that land at both Batam and Singapore.

The Nongsa-Changi cable is a 50km subsea connection between Changi, Singapore and Batam, landing directly at BW Digital Campus. It will be ready for service by Q4 2025.

Hawaiki Nui 1 is a 22,000km globe-spanning subsea cable that will land in Batam and Singapore, expected to go live in 2027.

Separately, there's also INSICA (Indonesia-Singapore Cable System) by Singtel and Telin, landing at Batam and Tuas, Singapore, the latter being Nxera's DC Tuas data centre.

That's not all. Existing subsea cables include BSCS (2009), B3JS (2018), and SEAX-1 (2019). Taken together, Batam is pretty well-wired to Singapore.

SIJORI: Growing together

I've written about SIJORI before. As I explained earlier this year, the plan is to build a cluster of interconnected data centres across Singapore, Johor, and Batam.

When pooled, the massive data centre capacity and connectivity in Johor, Batam and Singapore are on par with the largest data centre markets globally.

Speaking at today's event, EDB's Herman Loh spoke on SIJORI: "If you draw a 50-kilometre availability zone around Singapore, that's really where you land."

A data cluster around Singapore will benefit everyone, he said. The digital pie is growing quickly, there's enough for everyone, and it's not a zero-sum game.

The third leg materialises

With NDP1, Batam finally becomes a credible third leg in the SIJORI triangle. The 120MW capacity might seem modest compared to Johor's gigawatt-scale, but Batam offers something different: proximity to Singapore in an alternate country.

The timing is interesting too. As Singapore maintains strict sustainability requirements and Johor starts to run up against infrastructure constraints, Batam presents an alternative that's literally visible from Singapore's shores. At just 20km away, it's closer than many locations within Singapore itself.

What do you think of Batam and NDP1? Is the SIJORI concept finally becoming reality?