DayOne signs a 450MW PPA in Batam
What the deal tells us about Indonesia's quietly rising data centre hub.
DayOne has signed a 450MW PPA with state-run PLN Batam for a new data centre campus in Batam.
Signed on 17 April, the agreement will see PLN Batam deliver grid power to DayOne's site in the Kabil Industrial Tech Park in phases between 2026 and 2027. An accompanying MOU covers connectivity and electrical infrastructure services.
Let's take a look at Batam as a fast-growing data centre hub.
Batam's quiet rise
A short ferry ride from Singapore, Batam sits at the heart of a growing cluster of data centres. It hosts around a dozen facilities today, almost all built recently.
The advantages of Batam are several. It is a designated Free Trade Zone (FTZ), already connected to 13 subsea cables with more on the way, has future access to renewable energy, and sits away from earthquake-prone areas.
Just 20km from Singapore, the proximity means negligible latency, making Batam well suited for latency-sensitive enterprise workloads.
DayOne doubles down
It is worth noting that DayOne's original campus is a 72MW facility at Nongsa Digital Park (NDP). The new site will propel the firm into one of the largest operators in Indonesia.
As with its first facility, DayOne says the new campus will support "rising demand for cloud and advanced computing across Asia Pacific."
At last year's Computex, Nvidia's Jensen Huang spoke of an "Oracle Cloud Supercluster" of 260MW in Indonesia. The pieces are finally falling into place.
Johor's relief valve?
Batam is part of SIJORI, or the Singapore-Johor-Riau growth triangle. First mooted decades ago, the idea was to strengthen economic links between the three regions.
More recently, this has evolved into plans for a cluster of interconnected data centres across Singapore, Johor, and Batam. All three regions are within a 50km radius.
Given Johor's stratospheric data centre growth over the last few years, the nascent but rapidly growing hub in Batam could well serve as an overflow for cloud and AI workloads.
A few years back, few were talking about Batam. Today, there are multiple data centres, with more to come. Is Batam on your radar?
