Inside YTL's massive 600MW data centre campus
Johor campus reveals how hyperscale changes everything about data centre design.
Visited YTL's Green Data Center Park today, Malaysia's largest data centre campus at 600MW, and the scale was simply mind-blowing. I'm very thankful to Wai Mun, Maxx Wong and Martin How for hosting me earlier.
Going from the front gate to the last data centre by buggy at full speed took over 5 minutes, and I had to trim and speed up the video to 4x speed just for this post. The campus was a town by itself. Except that it consumes way more electricity and water. It also gave me much to think about regarding massive-scale data centres.
Captions: (Left) The second entrance; (Middle) Campus water storage; (Right) Transformer yard.
Built to a different scale
YTL's 600MW data centre campus shows how large data centre campuses are built differently. From on-site transformer yards and campus-level water reservoirs to how data centre blocks are designed, it's just done at a different scale.
I worked with Wai Mun a decade ago on marketing collaterals for Singtel's DC West - then Singapore's largest data centre. Let's just say that it would rank second last in this campus.
And YTL has the land for a "next" phase of data centre construction beyond the 7 data halls currently planned. This includes plans to build an onsite solar farm of up to 600MWp.
Captions: (Middle) Backup diesel generators; (Right) Zoomed in photo
Built-to-data centre
Large customers used to take up entire data halls or even an entire floor of a data centre with "built-to-suit" requirements.
Well, it's built-to-data centres these days.
Four of seven data centres in the current phase were already up or under construction, and I could see how they had completely different capacities, cooling designs, and power backup systems. Everything is customised.
Average density is rising quickly
For some time now, I've maintained that AI data centres are diverging from traditional data centres. Regardless, average data centre capacity is rising at a much faster pace than ever before.
It's worth noting that even the current high-density design at YTL that can support up to the top-of-the-line B300 GPUs will probably need to be ripped out and redone for Nvidia's 600kW Rubin Ultra.
Captions: (Left) Entrance; (Middle) Solar-powered streetlamps; (Right) Campus management site.
The scale question
Malaysia has up to 5GW of capacity already approved and coming up in the years ahead. To put that in perspective, that's roughly eight more campuses the size of YTL's.
The question isn't whether Malaysia can build this much capacity - clearly it can. It's whether the infrastructure, from power grids to water systems, can sustain it. Standing in YTL's campus, watching the scale of resources required for just 600MW, makes you wonder about the cumulative impact of 5GW.
Something to think about.
