Air Selangor Acting CEO Abas Abdullah (Pic by Patrick Goh)

KUALA LUMPUR (June 26): Water services operator Pengurusan Air Selangor Sdn Bhd (Air Selangor) is confident it can supply water to data centres without compromising public water supplies, said its acting chief executive officer Abas Abdullah.

Abas said Air Selangor has received water supply requests from data centres in locations such as Cyberjaya and Setia Alam.

“We have carried out our forecast before these data centres came in and have prepared ourselves to have a (water) reserve margin of 17%-20% (by 2030),” Abas told reporters on Thursday following the launch of Air Selangor’s 2023 sustainability report.

“For Air Selangor, we must be ready. We can allocate water to data centres without compromising the water supply to the public,” he added.

Air Selangor has taken several initiatives to maintain higher water reserve margins in the future, including building the Langat 2 Water Treatment Plant — which is also part of an interstate raw water transfer scheme, according to the group's acting director and head of operations, Ainul Azhar Mohd Jemoner.

On completion of phase one of the two-phase project, Ainul said Air Selangor achieved a water reserve margin of 15.34% in 2023, up from 12.02% the previous year. Phase two of the project, expected to be completed by 2030, will add another 1,100 million litres per day (MLD) to Air Selangor’s water supply capacity, he said.

That, together with pipe replacement initiatives aimed at reducing water loss, and its Labohan Dagang Phase 2 project — expected to be completed in 2029 — will contribute an additional 200 MLD," Ainul said. Altogether, these efforts should push the reserve margin to 17%-20% by 2030.

Abas and Ainul were addressing reporters' questions about whether the current water supply system can meet the increasing demand from data centres, and how it might affect Air Selangor's future water reserve margins.

Data centres, which house servers and other computing infrastructure, are not only major consumers of power but also significant users of water, primarily for cooling purposes. The demand for data centres has surged due to the growing needs of artificial intelligence.

Google is investing RM9.4 billion to house its first data centre and cloud in Malaysia, which will be located in Sime Darby Property Bhd's Elmina Business Park, while ByteDance is planning to expand its data centre facilities in Johor as part of a U$2.13 billion deal. Telekom Malaysia Bhd has partnered Singtel's Nxera to jointly develop data centres in Malaysia, with their first project being a 'sustainable, hyper-connected and AI-ready' campus in Johor.

From 2021 to 2023, data centres accounted for RM114.7 billion in investments, representing 79% of the total RM144.7 billion approved digital investments, according to the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry.