A record number landed last week, and it comes with a split worth holding onto. Asia-Pacific’s data centre development pipeline reached 26,455MW in the first half of 2026, Cushman & Wakefield reports in its half-yearly update. Of that, the firm puts 4,764MW under construction. The rest — 21,691MW — is planned: announced, drawn, not yet in the ground.
The half was busy by any measure. The pipeline grew by 7,103MW in six months, on Cushman & Wakefield’s count, about 2.6 times what the previous edition of the same series recorded for the preceding half. Delivery is the smaller number: the firm counts 1,372MW of new operational capacity, and says the region absorbed it, with colocation vacancy easing from 10.9% to 10.3%.
The lopsided split is not new. That earlier edition ran 3,677MW under construction against 15,694MW planned — 81% on paper. Since then construction has grown nearly 30%, and the planned share has barely moved, to 82%. (Those two percentages and the 2.6x are our arithmetic on the firm’s published figures, not its own framing.) Four-fifths of this pipeline being unbuilt is the market’s normal shape, not evidence that something just went wrong.
It does change how the country numbers should be read. Southeast Asia holds about half of everything under construction in Asia-Pacific, led by Malaysia at 1,039MW and Thailand at 859MW, according to the firm’s 5 August release. But a market can look like a leader or a laggard depending on which stage word is attached to the megawatts. The same release puts Bangkok at 859MW under construction, up 148% in six months — and at 134MW operating. Nearly all of Thailand’s construction sits in that one city. Johor is the mirror image: 1,110MW already running against 602MW being built.
Jakarta shows the same gap from the announcement side. Cushman & Wakefield puts the city at 395MW under construction, more than double six months ago, inside a 1,699MW pipeline. On 4 August, CoreWeave announced three Indonesian sites totalling 360MW of contracted IT power, to come online in 2028 — its first data centres in Asia-Pacific.
The two figures are close enough to invite a comparison that does not hold. One is capacity being poured now. The other is electricity contracted for delivery three years out. CoreWeave’s announcement does not say where the three sites are or how the capacity divides between them — Data Center Dynamics noted the same absence on the day — so there is no basis yet for placing any of it in Greater Jakarta. The announcement also came after Cushman & Wakefield’s survey closed on 30 June: the next update’s planned column will move, and the construction column need not.
The firm reads the half the same way. Neocloud providers have become a significant source of regional demand, it writes, and development is spreading into peripheral and emerging markets where power is easier to secure. Andrew Green, who runs its Asia-Pacific data centre group, calls this a phase of power-constrained execution, with siting logic shifting from connectivity toward electricity at scale.
Hence the case for keeping the stages apart. SouthwardTech’s Deployment Tracker records facility status and compute status on separate axes, because otherwise announced, contracted, under construction and operating all arrive as the same megawatt figure — and Bangkok is what a factor of six looks like when they do.
