Dark clouds ahead as Indonesia’s emissions surge from Asia’s need for data centres, Singapore’s offshore push

Pollution woes are hampering Indonesia’s economic ambitions as more tech firms seek vast spaces for energy-intensive data centres across Asia

Environmentalists say the data centre push, a lack of political will and financing interests will see Indonesia fall short of its climate goals

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Buildings seen shrouded in smog in Jakarta last month. Indonesia’s capital is one of the fastest-growing hubs in the Asia-Pacific for energy hungry data centres. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 11:30am, 23 Sep 2023

Indonesian tech worker Dennis cares about the environment but says he is in an impossible bind: he lives with his wife and five-year-old son in Bekasi, an industrial town east of Jakarta where the air is increasingly unbreathable – yet he fears his own job in tech is contributing to the damage.

“The air pollution is getting so bad,” he said, requesting to go by a pseudonym over fears of repercussions at his workplace. “My son and I had a bad cough that lasted almost a month.”

The 34-year-old works at a data centre – notoriously energy and water-intensive facilities chock-full of computer servers that store and distribute information, powering cloud computing but needing round-the-clock electricity, much of it still provided by burning coal.

The Babelan coal-fired plant in Bekasi. Most of the round-the-clock electricity that data centres in Indonesia require comes from coal-fired plants. Photo: Bloomberg

As data usage in Asia rises, including through the adoption of artificial intelligence, major tech companies are looking for vast new spaces to store the explosion of information that’s being created.

Young, conscious of the climate crisis and concerned for his family’s health, Dennis’ situation is made more complex by the tenuous foothold he has in Indonesia’s rapidly growing digital economy. He worries that he might miss a golden opportunity if he and his family decide to move elsewhere.

“I’m not sure what the right thing to do is,” he said.

Jakarta is one of the fastest-growing data centre hubs in the Asia-Pacific, second only to Melbourne in Australia, according to a joint report published by property consultancy Knight Frank and data centre research platform DC Byte.

But environmental activists question whether in the rush for digital primacy, Indonesia risks compromising its own climate target of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2060.

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