Market Trends of Malaysia Data Center Cooling Industry
IT and Telecom to Hold Significant Share
- The demand for efficient and sustainable cooling solutions has surged as the digital landscape expands and data centers increase. The demand for data centers is experiencing rapid growth, driven primarily by the telecom sector's need to deliver content, mobile, and cloud services. Ensuring the continued operation of these facilities is crucial. Interconnecting data centers and providing WAN connectivity are vital to network requirements, resulting in high storage resources and energy consumption, necessitating data center cooling.
- The WAN connectivity market in Malaysia is still in its early stages of development. Telekom Malaysia (TM), the established fixed-line provider in the country, introduced this service in November 2018, offering its customers a choice between two vendors. Although there are smaller telecom companies, value-added resellers, and system integrators like RedTone, ViewQwest, Netpoleon, LNS, and BreitKom operating in the market, its primary competitor, Maxis, only entered the SD-WAN market in 2019.
- Efficient management of thermal loads within telecom facilities and electronic enclosures is essential. Liquid cooling is a viable alternative to ambient air cooling due to its high heat-carrying capacity. Water, for instance, can carry about 3,500 times more heat than air. By employing economizer-based data center liquid cooling with advanced metal interfaces, cooling energy can be reduced to a mere 5% of the total energy consumed by the data center. This not only saves energy but also contributes to a reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
- With the 5G technology, the consumption rate is expected to increase, along with the need for effective data storage facilities in the industry. The development of digital infrastructures, such as data centers, is central to enabling 5G applications. With this, various investors are signing an agreement for the 5G launch.
- For instance, in November 2022, Malaysian telcos Celcom and DiGi approved the merger agreement. Once the two companies are fully merged, the new entity will be one of the largest carriers in Malaysia, with over 20 million subscribers. Such initiatives are increasing the data center construction in the country, leading to cooling solutions.
- Overall, with the company's increased investment in data centers, the need for efficient cooling solutions to ensure uninterrupted operations and data protection is vital. Such instances in the telecommunication sector are leading to rapid expansion and increasing data demands, fueling the growth of the data center cooling market in the country.
Understand The Key Trends Shaping This Market
Download PDF
Liquid Cooling to Hold Significant Growth
- As countries are racing against time to mitigate the devastating consequences of climate change, future infrastructure must be designed to limit increases in temperature to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In Malaysia, the development of smart district cooling systems is pivotal to improving the management of energy demands.
- District cooling produces chilled water centrally for distribution to nearby facilities through a network of insulated pipes to achieve efficient air conditioning of buildings and data centers. Using district cooling instead of using individual air conditioning systems can significantly reduce the usage of energy to somewhere in the range of 20% to 40%. The reduction in terms of energy usage translates into CO savings. In Malaysia, the trend of adoption of such solutions is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period.
- In Malaysia, ENGIE has been managing Pendinginan Megajana, a joint venture between ENGIE Services Malaysia and Cyberview, providing round-the-clock chilled water for air conditioning to 51 buildings in Cyberjaya township's data centers, malls, and office towers.
- The Malaysian data center market continues to see increased investments with AirTrunk, a hyperscale data center provider, announcing its entry into the country with a planned 150+ megawatt( MW) data center. Malaysia recently witnessed several large companies, including Equinix and Google, announcing plans to build more hyperscale data centers as well.
- These providers are using liquid cooling technology to reduce their data center power heat consumption. Sustainable innovations include a landmark cooling solution that utilizes a combination of indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) and direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology. The liquid cooling technology enables AirTrunk customers to deploy high-density racks, reducing energy consumption by up to 20%.
- Furthermore, cloud storage use has expanded over the years as SaaS provider expansion has enabled cloud storage providers to expand their capacity, which is likely to raise demand for liquid data center cooling systems. Cloud storage companies like Microsoft, AWS, and Google are expanding their storage capacity to enable more efficient cloud workflow, which will lead to major demand for liquid cooling.
