Digital Realty executives outlined plans this week to expand distributed digital infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific region, connecting core hubs in Singapore with growing capacity markets in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Developed with BW Digital, the Nongsa-Changi Cable System will deliver more than 1.6 petabits per second of capacity. The line connects Singapore’s SIN12 data center directly to Batam’s NDP1 facility with a targeted latency of less than two milliseconds.

Digital Realty’s Wilfried Dudink and Govind Choudhary noted that subsea connectivity is becoming integral to artificial intelligence deployments as operators split localized inference from large model training across regional hubs.

Workload requirements have split sharply over the past two years. Training foundational models demands contiguous megawatts of power and heavy cooling capacity. That creates bottlenecks in land-constrained cities. Inference tasks, by contrast, must sit beside enterprise users and sovereign data stores to prevent latency.

New software frameworks like Nvidia NeMo support model training across physically separated sites. This turns subsea optical lines into direct extensions of internal data center architecture. Digital Realty is adding fiber density to feed these distributed pipelines. Its KUL10 facility in Malaysia now hosts over 6,000 cores of long-haul and regional fiber.

As capacity develops across Southeast Asia, we increasingly see Singapore serving as a connectivity and governance hub for the region, hosting latency-sensitive and sovereign workloads in the city-state while neighboring markets provide greater capacity for larger compute and AI need.

Landing agreements and cross-border latency targets are reshaping industrial land values. Johor in southern Malaysia and Indonesia’s Riau Islands have absorbed billions of dollars in campus commitments.

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