Sunway Construction Group Bhd has won RM920.8 million of additional work on a data center in Johor for a U.S.-headquartered technology company, lifting the Malaysian builder's new orders this year to RM8.06 billion and its outstanding order book to RM11.7 billion, the company said in a Bursa Malaysia filing on Wednesday.

The award was one of several data center disclosures on the Kuala Lumpur exchange on Nov. 4. Electrical contractor Kee Ming Group Bhd took a RM44.17 million subcontract for a hyperscale data center project in Selangor, and the public tranche of data center engineer MyDCD Bhd's initial public offering was oversubscribed 36.46 times. For investors in Asia, the filings show that spending by U.S. technology groups on Malaysian server halls is still reaching local contractors' books, even after a global sell-off in AI-related shares that a Reuters column published by The Star on Wednesday said had stirred recession fears.

Sunway Construction's Order Book Swells

The new letter of award covers mechanical, electrical and plumbing fit-out for an ongoing Johor project and doubles as the instruction to start work, with completion targeted for the first quarter of 2028, according to the filing as reported by The Star and The Edge Malaysia. The client was not named. SunCon, as the company is known locally, said it does not expect the variation to have any immediate material effect on its 2026 earnings per share, net assets per share or gearing, The Star reported, while The Edge said the company expects the work to add to earnings from this year onward.

The pace of wins has picked up. As of June 17, the group had secured RM4.2 billion of new orders for the year and held an order book of RM8.8 billion, The Star reported at the time, after change orders from a U.S.-headquartered technology company lifted two Johor data center substation jobs to RM865.6 million. New orders have nearly doubled since then. In February, Business Today reported that SunCon had set a replenishment target of RM6.0 billion for 2026, and that data centers made up 41% of what was then a RM5.67 billion order book.

Sales have lagged the order wins so far. Second-quarter net profit rose 23.5% from a year earlier to RM103.59 million on wider margins, while revenue fell 31.1% to RM1.02 billion on lower construction revenue, The Edge reported. SunCon shares closed 4 sen, or 0.52%, lower at RM7.68 on Wednesday, giving the group a market value of about RM10.2 billion. The benchmark FBM KLCI slipped 0.33% to 1,616.56 on profit-taking.

Kee Ming and MyDCD Ride the Build-Out

Kee Ming's job covers general electrical works plus the electrical package for the main building of a hyperscale data center in Puncak Alam and is due for completion by July 30, 2027. It came from an unnamed contractor that specializes in electrical, cooling and turnkey engineering for data centers, the company said. Kee Ming listed on Bursa's ACE Market on Feb. 12 at 38 sen a share. It closed at RM2.79 on Wednesday, more than seven times its offer price, for a market value of RM906.8 million.

MyDCD, which provides mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire-protection engineering mainly for data centers, received 28,816 applications for 3.36 billion shares, worth RM1.88 billion, for the 89.7 million shares offered to the Malaysian public. The non-Bumiputera portion was oversubscribed 48.92 times and the Bumiputera tranche 24 times. The 56-sen offer comprises 335 million new shares, raising RM187.6 million for the company, and 145 million existing shares that will bring selling shareholders RM81.2 million. The company will be valued at about RM1 billion on listing, The Edge reported.

The contracts add to Malaysia's wider push for AI data center investment, and the utility's figures show how much of that pipeline has yet to draw power.

Johor Leads Tenaga's Data Center Pipeline

Data centers drew 1,256 megawatts from Tenaga Nasional Bhd's grid in June, up from 603 megawatts a year earlier, and used 4.0 terawatt-hours in the first half of 2026, 2.1 times the year-earlier amount, according to the utility's second-quarter analyst briefing in August. They made up 6% of TNB's electricity sales.

TNB counted 61 secured data center projects with a combined maximum demand of 8.35 gigawatts at the end of June. Johor held 29 of them and about 67% of the capacity. The 42 projects already connected carry a maximum demand of 5.65 gigawatts, more than four times the load drawn in June, and 16 more, totaling 2.21 gigawatts, were under construction. The briefing cited a 2026 Cushman & Wakefield comparison that ranked Johor first in Asia-Pacific for market preference, ahead of Sydney and Shanghai.

Serving that demand is a grid job. TNB plans RM43 billion of capital spending from 2025 to 2027, partly to meet demand from data centers and AI-driven industries, The Edge reported. At the Clean Energy Transition Asia 2026 summit in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, TNB's head of grid development, Shamsul Bahari Saad, said the utility has finished a 500-kilovolt line running north to south and is building a second backbone from the east to the south. Before Malaysia deepens links with its neighbors under the ASEAN Power Grid, he said, “we should strengthen our internal grid first.” TNB aims to finish a cross-border study with Thailand and Singapore, run through a joint working committee, by the end of next year.

The next marker for the sector is MyDCD's market debut. Notices of allotment go to successful applicants by Nov. 12, and the shares are scheduled to start trading on the ACE Market on Nov. 17.