Book 100 MW, use 50, and pay for all 100. That is the rule Malaysia's investment minister repeated on 12 November when he said the government will write disclosure duties for data centers into law. Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani, Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, spoke in Kuala Lumpur at the launch of a ministry app, Bernama reported via The Star.
What Operators Will Have To Report
Under the planned law, operators would have to disclose how much electricity their data centers use and how many GPU chips they import. The government also wants to know which operator and which hyperscaler sits behind each facility, and where it is. Johari said the monitoring has to continue after a project is approved; of 117 approved data center projects, 55 are in operation.
He gave two reasons. One is grid capacity: the government wants to cut reservations that are only used one to three years after they are booked. The other is chips. The Digital Ministry is checking whether existing laws allow action against the re-export of GPUs under US sanctions, after cases in which space was rented in local data centers, chips were imported and later shipped on.
TNB's Numbers Show The Gap
The billing rule itself is not new. On 15 October Johari told the Dewan Rakyat that grid upgrades are the investor's cost, that reserved capacity is billed in full and that data centers pay the market price for gas-fired power, without subsidy, according to the analysis site DC Market Insights. The same answer set a minimum of 30 percent local content per facility and made water recycling mandatory.
The utility's own figures explain the hurry. In its analyst briefing of 28 August, cited by DC Market Insights, Tenaga Nasional (TNB) listed 61 secured data center projects with 8.35 GW of maximum demand, of which 42 projects and 5.65 GW are already connected. Actual data center load was 1,256 MW in June 2026, up from 603 MW a year earlier. DC Market Insights works out that the connected projects draw about 22 percent of what they have reserved. No legal text has been published yet.
Sizing The Contract To The Build
For a developer in Johor or Selangor this changes the arithmetic of a phased campus. Booking the full campus load on day one used to be the safe option; under take-or-pay billing it becomes an expense for every hall that is not yet built. Expect grid contracts to follow the construction phases more closely, with the standby generating sets and their cooling phased the same way.
The reporting duty matters too. A regulator that receives real consumption data will know what each campus draws, and that information tends to come back in tariff and permit decisions.
Sources: The Star (Bernama), DC Market Insights
