Methodology

How this dataset is built, what the numbers mean, how we audit our own work, and where the limits sit. Last revised July 2026.

What this is

ArusGrid is an independent tracker of the data center buildout, project by project. For every project it follows where the project stands in its construction lifecycle, who is building it, who funds it, who operates it, who buys the capacity, how much IT load it carries, the capital committed to it, and what its power costs. The buildout is the subject, and power is one dimension of it. The name comes from arus, the Malay and Indonesian word for current.

Coverage is Southeast Asia and the Gulf. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines receive full research depth, as do the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The other five Southeast Asian countries are monitored from a distance because no verifiable facility there has crossed our size threshold, and the smaller Gulf states are treated the same way. Including them today would add rows without adding information.

Gulf capacity figures understate the Gulf, and the reason is disclosure rather than research. Gulf operators rarely state whether a megawatt figure means IT load, grid capacity or total facility power, and many publish no figure at all. Where the basis is unstated we record the number untagged and say so on the project. Where no figure exists we leave it blank rather than invent one, so several real Gulf projects appear with no capacity beside them. The largest of them records only its committed first phase against a far larger announced programme. Treat Gulf planned capacity as a floor built from what operators have actually stated.

What qualifies for inclusion

A facility qualifies at 20 MW of planned or built IT load. Smaller facilities also qualify when a hyperscaler or AI tenant is confirmed. We exclude legacy enterprise colocation below 20 MW, corporate server rooms and telco exchanges, which means our country totals will read lower than surveys that count every telco room. Cancelled projects stay in the dataset because the graveyard carries signal, and they are excluded from every total on every page.

How coverage differs between regions

Southeast Asian coverage is deeper than Gulf coverage, and the reasons are worth stating because they are not all the same kind of reason.

Part of it is simply time. Southeast Asia has been researched in successive passes with audits between them, so each project there rests on more citations than a Gulf one does. That part closes with work.

The count itself is a different matter. We list fewer Gulf projects than commercial directories do, but a sweep of the operators' own published estates found almost nothing above our size threshold that we were missing. Gulf directories, like Southeast Asian ones, are largely filled with small colocation halls that we exclude by design. Where we genuinely cannot see is stranger than that. The largest operator in the United Arab Emirates states that it runs thirty live data centres totalling 673 megawatts, and its website names two of them. Its own locations page does not exist. No amount of further searching resolves that, because the information has not been published.

The other part does not close. The layers of information that sit around a project, rather than inside it, largely do not exist in the Gulf. Six of our sixteen Southeast Asian markets have a vacancy rate published by a commercial research firm. None of the seven Gulf markets does, because no firm publishes a Gulf series at all. Every Southeast Asian country has an electricity tariff we can cite and defend. Neither Gulf country does: the two Emirates differ so widely that a single national figure would be misleading, and the Saudi regulator's own tariff pages could not be retrieved across repeated attempts through different tools. Where that is true we show a blank rather than a number, here as everywhere else.

What may surprise you is that individual Gulf projects are not more poorly documented than Southeast Asian ones. A larger share of them name a customer, and a larger share state whether a capacity figure means IT load. Gulf projects tend to be enormous and politically visible, so the ones that surface publicly are covered well. The Gulf tells you a great deal about a few buildings and very little about the market around them, and nothing at all about the ones its operators choose not to name. Southeast Asia is the reverse.

Definitions

Development stages

announced → land_permitting → financing_closed → under_construction → commissioning → operational → expanding, with terminal states cancelled and on_hold. A campus with both live and building phases is expanding.

A stage at or beyond under_construction requires a dated source saying construction actually happened. Land purchase plus regulatory approval does not qualify. A groundbreaking that was scheduled does not count until a source confirms it took place.

Megawatts are IT load

All megawatt figures aim to capture IT load, the power available to computing equipment. Press coverage routinely mixes IT load, total facility power and grid connection capacity for the same site, and one campus can appear at 180, 120 and 100 MW depending on which basis a writer picked up. Where sources conflict we take the conservative IT load figure and log the contradiction. Where only another basis exists we keep the number and tag its basis.

Live and planned MW

AI readiness, four tiers

Evidence tiers

Announced pipelines mix real projects with paper. Sell-side coverage of the US market rates only about a third of its announced nameplate capacity as credible, and Southeast Asia is no different. Every active facility here therefore carries an evidence tier that grades how much verifiable support sits behind it. The tier grades a project's public paper trail. It says nothing about any company, and cancelled projects carry no tier at all.

Tiers are computed by fixed rules rather than judgment calls, and every facility's detail panel shows the checklist behind its tier. Operational capacity is verified on its own. Reaching construction requires a dated source under our stage rules, so building sites are corroborated by definition. Everything earlier is scored on six signals. A named funder. A disclosed tenant, where a confirmed tenant counts double. Committed, approved or borrowed capital. A dated and sized construction phase. Three or more cited sources. A cited source dated within the last 24 months. Projects on hold rate thin regardless of their other signals.

One limit is worth naming. Most citations recorded before mid 2026 carry no publication date, so the recency signal reads older entries as silent, and no rule can see private progress. Thin means the public record is empty. A real project with a quiet sponsor will rate thin until it produces evidence, and that is the tier working as designed.

A second limit matters more the further a project sits from Southeast Asia. The tier grades whether a project is real, not whether we know its size. A facility can be verified because it is demonstrably operating and still carry no capacity figure at all, because its operator has never published one. Read the tier as confidence that the project exists and stands where we say it stands, never as confidence that the megawatts beside it are complete.

Chip export-control access

This applies to Gulf coverage, which is in preparation, and no project carries the field today. It is documented here because the criteria are published whenever the data is.

In Southeast Asia the constraint that decides whether a project happens is grid access and the price of power. In the Gulf, power is cheap and allocated by government, and the constraint that bites is whether a project can lawfully receive the US-controlled chips an AI facility is built around. So Gulf projects carry a tier grading what the public record documents about that access. As with evidence tiers, the grade describes a project's paper trail and never a company, and it is computed by fixed rules from cited government documents.

Three limits are worth stating plainly. The lowest tier is not an accusation. Absence of a public document is not evidence that access was sought, refused or revoked, and most companies never publish their licensing position at all. The engine also does not treat corporate ownership as coverage, so a subsidiary whose parent is named in a government list still rates on its own record, because the document names the parent and not the building. And we publish no percentage. Exactly three entities across the region hold a named, dated authorisation, which is enough to sort projects into categories and nowhere near enough to support arithmetic, so there is no share-of-pipeline figure here of the kind we publish for AI readiness and evidence.

Two facts shape everything in this field. The United Arab Emirates has a country-level framework with a named list of approved recipients. Saudi Arabia does not, and operates through individual authorisations instead. One country has a rule, the other has a licence, and reading a Gulf project without knowing which applies to it will mislead you.

Markets before countries

Data center markets are catchments of power, fiber and land. Countries are the political rollup. Johor serves Singapore overflow hyperscale demand while Klang Valley serves domestic colocation. Batam sells latency to Singapore while Jakarta sells data residency to Indonesians. We track 16 markets across the six countries and match the market definitions used by the firms that publish vacancy, so their published figures stay comparable with ours.

Vacancy

Vacancy is the share of built, leasable colocation capacity sitting empty, with hyperscaler self-build excluded. Six of our 16 markets have a published figure. The rest show a blank and we never estimate one. A vacancy number also needs its cause before it means anything. Johor sits near 1 percent because demand absorbs everything built. Singapore sits near 5 percent because regulation caps supply. Greater Manila sits near 44 percent because capacity jumped sharply in a single half and the new stock has yet to lease up. Three different stories hide behind what looks like one metric.

Figures carry different vintages and the gap matters. Greater Manila, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City are current to the first half of 2026, and Ho Chi Minh City received its first published vacancy figure in that edition after years of qualitative coverage only. Singapore and Greater Jakarta are still current to December 2025 because their newer figures sit behind a paywall. We show the vintage rather than rolling an old number forward.

Power cost

Facility level electricity prices are almost never public. Unless a facility has a cited public power purchase agreement, its power cost is the country industrial tariff and is labelled as such. The annual electricity bill shown on the map multiplies planned MW by 8,760 hours and the tariff. It assumes full IT load, excludes cooling overhead and is always labelled an estimate.

Sourcing standards

• We never invent numbers. Unknown MW stays blank. Fields that are structurally private, such as live MW, power purchase prices and project debt terms, are recorded as unknown.
• Every stage change and every new facility needs a dated source. We rely on operator announcements, filings from regulators, utilities and stock exchanges, and the specialist trade press, including Data Center Dynamics and W.Media.
• Aggregator market reports are banned as facility sources. One invented a nonexistent billion dollar campus. They inform sizing context only.
• Directories are for discovery. Their megawatt figures carry no stated basis, and we once found a facility overstated seven times against the operator's own on-record words. A number backed only by a directory listing is treated as unsourced.
• Tenants are graded. Confirmed requires a source that says so explicitly. Inference earns reported or rumored, and prelease rumors are often wrong. Technology vendors stay out of the tenant list, and a network on-ramp inside a colo reaches compute hosted elsewhere, so it never counts as a hyperscaler tenancy.
• Capital figures are announced commitments. Actual spend is never public. We store the original currency verbatim, convert to US dollars at the exchange rate of the announcement date, and record what the money covers. Country programs and platform acquisitions live in a separate deals layer so facility totals stay clean. Marketing ceilings, the room-to-triple kind of claim, never enter planned MW.
• Government incentive filings state ceilings. Their capex values are flagged and left out of clean totals unless the operator confirms the number independently.

How we audit ourselves

Every research batch is followed by an adversarial fact check. An independent pass reverifies sampled entries claim by claim against primary sources and benchmarks our coverage against third party trackers. Corrections go into the dataset and the audit files are kept as receipts.

Across all audits we found zero fabricated sources, zero banned aggregators cited and zero fabricated facilities. The two failure directions shaped two standing rules. A stage only moves up on a dated source, and a stage only freezes after a search for later operator statements. Coverage benchmarking cuts both ways as well. One audit showed we were undercounting Thailand and added 16 facilities we had missed.

Few trackers publish their own error rate. We do it because a reader deserves to know how wrong a dataset tends to be, and in which direction.

Known limitations

• Live MW is systematically undercounted because operators rarely publish it. Country live totals sum disclosed figures only.
• The timeline shows only dated phases, currently a small share of planned MW. It states its coverage and claims nothing beyond it.
• The news feed can only show events that carry a date, and most of the dataset predates our dated source rule. Absence from the feed says nothing about absence of activity. The banner on that page quantifies the gap.
• Vietnam runs at lower confidence. State owned operators publish racks and floor space instead of IT load, and Vietnamese sources use one word for three different power figures. We tag the ambiguity instead of resolving it by guesswork.
• Roughly half of all facilities have no usable capital figure. That reflects what gets disclosed, and we leave the gap open instead of filling it with estimates.
• The dataset is a snapshot with a changelog. Stage change history accumulates from mid 2026 onward.