Southeast Asia’s tech funding doubled in the first half of 2026. Take one company out and it shrank.
The region raised US$7.4 billion between January and June, against US$3.2 billion in the same months last year. US$4.5 billion of it went to DayOne, a data-centre operator, across two Series C rounds. Everything else adds up to roughly US$2.9 billion, spread over a falling deal count of 127 against 153 a year earlier, which is less than the region raised in the first half of 2025. The record year is one company buying power.1
DayOne is Singapore-domiciled and was spun out of GDS Holdings, China’s largest data-centre operator, whose founder William Huang still chairs both boards. It is heading for a US listing at a targeted US$20 billion valuation on a US$5 billion raise. It holds 480 megawatts in service or under construction across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, with another 590 megawatts reserved.
The headline says startups. The money says real estate and power.
The headline says startups. The money says real estate and power.
Singapore booked US$6.9 billion of the half, 94 percent of everything raised in the region, with Bangkok at US$116 million and Kuala Lumpur at US$104 million. Singapore is where the money is registered rather than where it is poured. The city froze new data-centre construction in 2019 over land, electricity and water, and the freeze is why the buildout belongs to somebody else’s landscape. Enterprise infrastructure took US$5.2 billion of the half. Fintech fell to US$685 million.
The record year is one company buying power.
Across the Causeway, JLL has Malaysia’s capacity more than doubling to 2,055 megawatts by the end of this year, with 3,500 megawatts more queued beyond it. Johor Bahru carries most of that: 850 megawatts completed, 1,800 under construction, 2,700 in the pipeline, a 70 percent compound growth rate since 2020 and the fastest in Asia-Pacific. Stack Infrastructure’s Johor campus is the whole trade written as a line item. Two buildings, 220 megawatts, a million square feet on 10.8 hectares in Iskandar Puteri, ten minutes from the border crossing, fed by an on-site substation off Tenaga Nasional’s 275-kilovolt network. First delivery is Q4 2026.
The payment order runs straight off that sentence. The operator takes the round. The landowner sells the 10.8 hectares once. Tenaga signs a twenty-year customer. The contractor bills the million square feet. The constraint they are all bidding against is the queue: JLL puts grid-connection waits at about 24 months in the region’s emerging markets and up to eight years in the core ones, and Johor has asked water-cooled projects to hold at least 18 months, into mid-2027, while it works out how to move water to fifteen operating sites with dozens more coming.
Below that sits the tier nobody pitches at a demo day. Eighteen hundred megawatts under construction in Johor is several thousand people who arrive on a Monday and want lunch by noon. Crews. Electrical contractors. Commissioning engineers flown in on rotation. Project managers who will hold a desk in Iskandar Puteri for three years and then leave. They eat, they rent, they drink on a Friday. The coworking floor, the kitchen, the serviced apartment, the laundry, the clinic. The US$7.4 billion will never touch any of it, which is exactly why an operator with a lease and a year of runway can own it.
Stack’s first building takes power in the last quarter of this year. Johor’s water is promised for mid-2027.
Footnotes
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GDS put US$405 million into DayOne and has already recouped most of it. The roughly 24 percent it still holds could be worth US$5 billion at the bell, which is a better multiple than most of the region’s app founders will see this decade. ↩