Johor has the data centres. Does it have the connectivity?
Johor is now a primary hub, but its fibre lags.
Johor has shifted from spillover location to primary data centre hub. But it's facing a serious deficit in fibre and subsea connectivity.
At the Johor Interconnect World Forum 2026, this is what William Heng and Sylvester Wong, my two panellists, told me.
A major data centre hub
Johor had traditionally absorbed overflow data centre demand from Singapore, but it is now a major hub in its own right. Slowly but surely, the centre of gravity is shifting.
The current pattern has customers connecting first into Singapore's rich connectivity ecosystem and backhauling traffic to Johor data centres for compute and storage. But as capacity shifts, the appeal of landing in Singapore will decrease, William argues. And as more subsea cables land directly in Johor, the two markets will gradually detach.
AI is changing connectivity
AI workloads are also placing different demands on connectivity, and it isn't just a surge in demand from AI agents either. Where traditional networking is predominantly north-south, with data transmitted to end users, AI data centres are increasingly east-west, with data centres talking to each other within clusters.
We still need north-south connectivity with AI, for carrying inference results to customers. But expect massive growth in inter-data centre traffic.
The real bottleneck
Sylvester thinks Malaysia has a "serious deficit" in networking, and that operators are rushing to build data centres without enough underlying network infrastructure.
His argument runs like this. Power has alternatives, whether gas, solar, hydro, or fuel cells, and most of these plants can be built relatively quickly. A subsea cable, by contrast, can take six to seven years just to get permission and actually land. Subsea connectivity is therefore arguably more critical and more time-sensitive than power. What's more, the industry isn't planning capacity against real projected demand the way Singapore did.
What Johor needs next
My conclusion after hearing from my panel? Johor needs significantly more internetworking across the board. That means diverse inter-data centre connectivity, backhaul fibre across the country, and cable landing stations for subsea cables.
When it comes to connectivity, there is a need to anticipate upcoming demand, not just provision for what's currently in use. The data centres are arriving. The question is whether the fibre to feed them will arrive in time.
