Cushman & Wakefield's APAC data centre report, published August 5, 2026, carries a record figure: the region's combined under-construction and planned pipeline has reached 26.5GW, with 7.1GW added in the first half of 2026 alone. Of that, 4.8GW is under construction and 21.7GW is planned, against 1.4GW actually delivered in the same period. Colocation vacancy fell from 10.9% in H2 2025 to 10.3%.

The report's conclusion compresses to one line: what limits expansion is no longer demand, it's power. Power constraints are pushing hyperscale deployment away from the traditional hubs.

Tokyo and Singapore: Two Different Kinds of Tight

Japan added 293MW of operational capacity in the half, reaching 1.8GW and overtaking India to become APAC's second-largest operational market behind mainland China. But long waits for power access and a shortage of construction capacity keep constraining new supply around Greater Tokyo, and developer interest is spreading to regional markets such as Hokkaido and Fukuoka.

Singapore is tight in a different way: roughly 1.46GW live in 2026, still the largest in Southeast Asia, but with only about 20MW under construction against a pipeline near 980MW — a very visible gap between demand and the pace of approvals. The 2019 moratorium on new builds was lifted in 2022, but with sustainability standards and capacity limits attached, so growth stays deliberately modest. The overflow crossed the strait to Johor, where operational capacity now stands at 1,110MW, up 24% year on year. For comparison: Sydney 917MW (+17%), Mumbai 890MW (+16%).

What Any of This Has to Do With Buying One VPS

Honestly, less directly than a headline would like: a 1–4 core VPS is not competing for the power-dense halls that AI training clusters occupy. But three effects are real:

  • Falling vacancy means less slack: inventory and price flexibility get worse in popular locations, and out-of-stock or repriced nodes become more common — Tokyo and Singapore especially.
  • New capacity increasingly isn't where you assume: over the next two years, more operational capacity lands in peripheral markets like Johor and Japan's regional cities than in the central hubs. "Close to my users" and "newest facility" get harder to satisfy at once.
  • The network path matters more than the administrative label: capacity spilling outward reshapes interconnection. What you should actually evaluate is measured latency and packet loss to your users, not which city name sounds more impressive.

How to Pick a Region in Practice

Don't choose a facility by the gigawatt figures in a report — choose by where your visitors are. For audiences in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Hong Kong and Japan nodes are usually the latency answer. For Southeast Asia, Singapore's interconnection density is still hard to replace. For North America, the US West Coast is the direct route. The method is unglamorous: spin up the smallest monthly instance in two or three candidate locations and measure for a few days from real user networks, then decide on your own numbers — which will always fit your case better than an industry report does. SharkCloud has nodes in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, with specs and bandwidth allowances listed on the plan pages, which makes that kind of low-cost side-by-side test straightforward.