KUALA LUMPUR: THE Ministry of Investment, Trade, and Industry (MITI) is finalising sustainable development guidelines for data centres.

Its Minister, Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Abdul Aziz, said his ministry has held several engagement sessions with various government agencies and data centre industry players in Malaysia to develop the guidelines.

He added that the guidelines include metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) to measure energy and water efficiency.

"In addition, to ensure a comprehensive approach to sustainable data centre development, the guidelines also set a metric for Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) to measure carbon emissions by data centres.

"The guidelines are being finalised and will be one of the requirements for incentive applications for future data centre investments," he said during a question-and-answer session in the Dewan Rakyat today.

Tengku Zafrul said this in response to a question from Mohd Syahir Che Sulaiman (PAS-Bachok), who asked about the current status of energy and water usage guidelines for data centres, as part of efforts to ensure data centres in Malaysia support the net-zero carbon emission target by 2050.

He added that the government also encourages the implementation of green technology policies and the use of renewable energy (RE) in data centre operations to achieve the 70 per cent RE target by 2050, as outlined in the National Energy Transition Roadmap.

Tengku Zafrul noted that the Corporate RE Supply Scheme (CRESS) is also being implemented to facilitate access for data centre operators to RE sources generated by third parties.

"CRESS will facilitate and enable more data centres to benefit from RE, making the operational costs of the centres more competitive in the long term," he added.