Singapore's data centres moved to Batam, and the taps ran dry

Batam is about an hour by ferry from Singapore, and that short crossing is the whole business case. Nikkei Asia reports that the island has become a new Southeast Asian hub for data centres, the warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that run cloud services and train AI models, because companies can serve Singapore from Indonesian land. Now the projects are meeting growing local rejection, and Nikkei puts two reasons in its own subheadline: a water problem and a power outage on Batam during the AI-driven boom.

The complaint is not abstract. Juniadi Adinda has lived in his Batam village for 26 years and says he never had trouble with the water supply before. Data centres are heavy users of exactly the two things a household notices when they go missing. The machines inside run hot and are usually cooled with water, and they draw steady electricity from the same grid that serves everyone else. At Nongsa Digital Park on Batam, another one was still under construction in June.

Nikkei's reporters filed from Purwakarta in West Java and Medan in North Sumatra as well, which puts the argument beyond one island. The shape of it will be familiar from mining and palm oil: the land and the utilities are Indonesian, and the customer is somewhere else. What is different is that nothing leaves on a ship. Water and electricity go in at one end, and computing for a richer neighbour comes out at the other.

Why it matters

Anyone living near a planned data centre now has a concrete question to ask before construction starts: how much water will the site draw, and from where. Batam shows the answer arrives as a dry tap rather than a disclosure. Watch whether any Indonesian authority begins publishing water and power figures for these projects, because once the building is up the demand is locked in for years.