DayOne raises $3.67B to expand its Malaysia data centers
The AI build-out's financing engine kept turning overnight: another multibillion-dollar debt package for hyperscale capacity in Johor, landing days before the developer's own Nasdaq debut.
Singapore data center developer DayOne has secured about $3.67 billion in financing from seven banks to expand its hyperscale capacity in Johor, Malaysia — including a $2.4 billion offshore term loan facility alongside a ringgit-denominated Islamic facility. The consortium reads like a shortlist of Asia's biggest lenders: CIMB, Crédit Agricole CIB, DBS, Maybank, OCBC, Standard Chartered and UOB arranged the package, which the company says will fund the expansion of its Johor campus — the strip of Malaysia just across the border from Singapore that has become the region's default answer when Singapore's grid and land run short. The deal builds on a 15 billion ringgit loan the company drew in 2025, bringing its cumulative Malaysia financing platform to roughly 30 billion ringgit. In a market where the phrase "AI data center" has become shorthand for a financing structure as much as a building, DayOne's package is one of the clearest signs yet that lenders now treat hyperscale capacity as a bankable asset class in Southeast Asia.
Why it matters: the sequencing. DayOne filed for its Nasdaq IPO on October 6, seeking up to $5 billion at a reported valuation around $20 billion, and this debt landed first — banks wrote the equity story's opening chapter. Its H1 revenue more than tripled year over year to $512 million in its listing filing, and the demand assumption underneath is explicitly AI: consultancy BCG projects Malaysia's data center supply will reach 4.2 to 6.1 gigawatts by 2030, roughly 39% annual growth from 2023, as Amazon, Google and Microsoft crowd into the same Johor power corridors. Lenders have not been indiscriminate — we covered their decision to cap exposure on Banks cap their exposure on Volta's $5B AI loan — so a seven-bank consortium putting 30 billion ringgit behind one operator's Johor expansion says the credit work on AI infrastructure is being done, and coming back favorable.
What to watch: whether the debt-then-equity play converts — DayOne is aiming to list as soon as the next quarter, and public-market appetite for a company whose story is mostly megawatts will set the price for every data center developer that follows it.
When banks will lend billions for AI capacity but cap their exposure elsewhere, who really holds the risk in the build-out? Tell us in the comments.
