JOHOR BARU: Johor has given its assurance that all data centre projects in the state are thoroughly evaluated before approval is granted.
State public works, transportation, infrastructure and communications committee chairman Mohamad Fazli Mohamad Salleh said a special technical committee will assess the feasibility of each data centre development project holistically.
This would be mainly regarding water and power supply needs, utility issues and suitability of the development zone, he added.
Mohamad Fazli said the committee comprised representatives from all relevant technical departments and agencies at both state and federal levels.
Among the key aspects assessed by the committee is water usage efficiency (WUE) of the data centres and total water required for the entire development project.
“Many are concerned about the development of data centres in Johor due to the belief that data centres consume a large amount of water to cool their equipment, which could affect the capacity of treated water available,” he said in a Facebook post yesterday, Bernama reported.
The exco member said Johor has set a WUE threshold of 1.8, adding that it was the same standard as Singapore.
“Even if a data centre achieves a WUE below 1.8, approval still depends on the availability of sufficient water,” he added.
However, Mohamad Fazli emphasised that compliance with the WUE standard alone did not guarantee approval, adding that it also depended on the availability of water resources in the area concerned.
He said there were various modern cooling technologies capable of achieving much lower WUE values than the set threshold, including Immersion Cooling (either single-phase or two-phase) and Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling (DCD), which record WUE values ranging from 0.05 to 0.2.
In addition, he said there were cooling technologies that did not directly use water, such as dry coolers), air cooling and in-row or close-coupled air systems which used minimal water for domestic purposes.
He noted that if data centres still required water as a cooling medium, the technical committee would instruct the project consultants to explore alternative water sources, instead of relying solely on existing treated water.
“Data centre developers have been asked to use treated recycled water from sewage treatment plants for cooling purposes.
“For example, Bridge Data Centres and Computility Technology (Malaysia) have adopted this approach,” he added.
Mohamad Fazli revealed that certain data centre projects have been directed to collaborate with Johor Special Water to provide alternative water sources suitable for cooling tower systems, without affecting the treated water supply for public use.
