Google will spend US$160 million on a reservoir and water treatment plant in Port Dickson, Negeri Sembilan, meant to serve both its planned data centre and the state's public water supply. That is about RM651 million at Bank Negara Malaysia's noon middle rate of RM4.0665 to the dollar on 2 November. We set the plant's size against the state's own water records: its capacity of 65 million litres a day is equal to about 12% of the water Negeri Sembilan used on an average day in 2024.
Quick facts
- Cost: US$160 million, about RM651 million, paid by Google.
- Capacity: 65 million litres of treated water a day, fed by an off-river reservoir on Sungai Linggi.
- Owner once built: Menteri Besar Negeri Sembilan (Incorporated), the state's asset-holding body.
- Built by Gamuda, with the state government and Syarikat Air Negeri Sembilan (SAINS).
- Home share: 25% of capacity under Gamuda's 2025 agreement with the state. Google's new statement does not repeat that figure.
What Google announced
According to Google's statement, as carried by Bernama and reported by Free Malaysia Today, the reservoir sits along Sungai Linggi and is designed to capture excess river flow and rainfall in wet periods, which Google says will help reduce flood risk in nearby areas. In drier periods the plant draws on those reserves. Google also said it will pay the full cost of the electricity its Port Dickson campus uses and the cost of connecting it to the grid, and that its own water risk assessment found local sources were not at high risk of running short.
The campus is planned to run Google services such as Search, Maps and Chrome. It sits in the same Port Dickson area where Gamuda broke ground on a data centre hub and signed a memorandum with the state for a 65 million litre a day plant, with 25% of its capacity set aside for household use in Negeri Sembilan and the rest for the data centre.
The plant against the state's own numbers
DOSM's water consumption records put Negeri Sembilan's average daily use in 2024 at 323 million litres for homes and 237 million for everything else, 560 million in all. DOSM marks its latest year as provisional. Set against those averages:
- The plant's full capacity, 65 million litres a day, is equal to about 12% of the state's total.
- If the 25% home share from the 2025 agreement applies, that is about 16 million litres a day, roughly 5% of what households used.
- The other 75%, about 49 million litres a day, would be equal to about a fifth of non-household use.
These set a plant's maximum capacity beside past average use, as a sense of scale. They are not forecasts of how much more water the state will have, since how SAINS will feed the new supply into its network has not been published.
The household side
Average household use in Negeri Sembilan rose from 276 million litres a day in 2015 to 323 million in 2024, an increase of 47 million, according to the same DOSM series. A 16 million litre home share would be roughly a third of that nine-year rise. For more on the cost of running data centres in this climate, see our piece on cooling tropical data centres, and for another Malaysian tech park building out its infrastructure, Kulim Hi-Tech Park's new fibre deal.
Two things are not in the announcements we read: an opening date for the plant, and whether the 25% home share from Gamuda's 2025 agreement carries over unchanged into Google's funding. Google's statement says only that the water will be supplied for domestic and commercial use.
