5 NOV 2026 — Google said on 4 November it will invest US$15 billion in Malaysia in 2027 and 2028, across data centre campuses, clean energy, water projects and training. That is 7.5 times the US$2 billion it announced in May 2024 for its first Malaysian data centre, by our arithmetic.
The announcement is specific about jobs, GDP, training, efficiency and new clean energy. It gives no figures for the two resources Malaysia's data centre debate turns on: how much electricity the new campuses will draw and how much water they will use.
The numbers Google gave
Google's Elmina Business Park campus in Selangor is already running, and new campuses are planned in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan. Building them in 2027 and 2028 is expected to add an average of US$1.1 billion a year to national output and to support upwards of 37,000 Malaysian jobs in each of those years, with US$378 million in average annual labour income. Google puts about 6,000 of those jobs on the construction sites themselves, roughly one in six by our arithmetic.
The jobs and income figures together imply an average of about US$10,200 per job a year. That is our division, and it spreads the income across all 37,000 jobs, most of which are not on the building site. Once the campuses are running, Google projects more than 9,000 people in work each year, on pay averaging 45% more than Malaysia's median wage.
On energy, Google promises more than 1 gigawatt of new clean generation for the national grid, via a collaboration with Tenaga Nasional Berhad under Malaysia's Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme. It says it will pay for all the power its campuses use and for the direct cost of connecting them to the grid. It expects a power usage effectiveness of 1.12 to 1.14 in Malaysia's climate, against what it calls an industry average of 1.54. Four training programmes are aimed at 800,000 Malaysians from 2027 to 2031.
The gaps
Start with the load. The 1 gigawatt is new grid generation Google will help add, not a campus demand figure. The announcement does not say how much power the campuses themselves will need, so a reader cannot tell whether that gigawatt covers their demand, exceeds it or falls short. Power usage effectiveness describes overhead relative to computing load. Without the load, it does not give a total.
Malaysia's own disclosures keep leaving the same gap. When the Digital Ministry set out 27 fast-tracked data centre projects in October, it listed jobs and investment but no figure for electricity or water. Moody's estimated in September that data centres took 4% of Peninsular Malaysia's electricity in 2025 and could take 31% by 2035.
The water figures are missing too. Google says its risk assessments found the watersheds in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan "were not at high risk of scarcity or depletion", which is why it chose water cooling there. It gives no volume. It says it publishes each operating site's annual water use in its environmental report, but the most recent edition, the 2025 report covering 2024, does not mention Malaysia. Its efficiency table lists two Singapore sites, at 1.13 and 1.15 for 2024.
One part of the 2024 plan has yet to arrive. That announcement presented Elmina as Google's "first Google data center and Google Cloud region" in Malaysia. This week's announcement describes the cloud region as "upcoming".
Google also says it will fund programmes from 2027 to lower household electricity bills in the states where its campuses sit. It did not say how much those programmes will cost or how many households they will reach.
