The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a development finance organization and World Bank Group member, has announced that it will invest up to $175 million in proposed AirTrunk data centers in Johor, Malaysia.

JHB1, which came online in July 2024, currently offers more than 50MW of capacity and is estimated to provide more than 150MW of capacity at completion.

JHB2, which was announced in February 2025, is estimated to provide more than 270MW of capacity.

Both projects are being built on 520 hectares of land formerly belonging to an industrial park called the Southern Industrial and Logistics Cluster, located in Iskandar Malaysia, a development corridor to the west of Johor Bahru.

The IFC said that it would provide funding through a combination of debt financing and equity investment.

An environmental disclosure for the two projects states that the data centers would consume approximately 910 million liters of water per year at 100 percent utilization. Data centers do not run at full utilization for most of the time, however.

According to Malaysia’s Department of Statistics, in January 2022, the state of Johor consumed around 536 million liters of water per day.

Founded in 2018, AirTrunk was acquired by Blackstone and CPPIB for $16.1bn in 2024 in what was the largest-ever deal in the space at the time.

AirTrunk has data center campuses in operation and development in Sydney (x3) and Melbourne (x2) in Australia, as well as Singapore; Hong Kong; Johor, Malaysia; Tokyo (x2), and Osaka (x2), Japan.

The IFC announced last month that it would provide a $71m loan to Indian data center firm Sify.