COMPUTE & CONNECTIVITY DESK · DISPATCH
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) committed up to MYR 300 million — about US$75.8 million, by the bank's own published conversion — to a sukuk wakalah, an Islamic financing structure in which an agent deploys funds from multiple issuances into Shariah-compliant assets, backing hyperscale data centers at Elmina Business Park in Selangor, Malaysia. The commitment, announced 28 July 2026, is the multilateral development bank's first-ever Islamic finance investment. It is also, by Sime Darby Property's own claim, the world's first green sukuk dedicated to financing a hyperscale data center — the sukuk qualifies as a green instrument under international sustainable bond standards, built with ADB's assistance through its GSS+ Initiative, with ADB itself serving as joint sustainability structuring adviser. Two capital pools, religious-finance and sustainability-labelled, converge on the same facility.
The issuer is Sime Darby Property NEV (Holdings) Sdn Bhd, developing build-to-suit-to-lease hyperscale data centers under long-term tenancy agreements with multinational technology and logistics operators; ADB's release does not name a specific tenant or lease term. ADB's ticket sits inside a broader RM 2.6 billion sukuk programme Sime Darby launched in June to fund the platform, supporting a RM 1.25 billion discretionary fund (the NEV Fund) focused on data centers and industrial and logistics assets. Maybank Islamic Berhad and OCBC Al-Amin Bank Berhad have also committed to invest in the sukuk, and the Credit Guarantee & Investment Facility, an ADB trust fund, provides a partial guarantee on the paper — meaning ADB is underwriting risk for private bondholders as much as lending its own balance sheet.
The instrument is the story regardless of the green label. A sukuk wakalah pays investors a return derived from asset usage rather than interest, letting ADB tap Islamic capital markets — pools of Sharia-compliant investment a conventional development-bank loan cannot reach — to fund infrastructure that looks, functionally, identical to any other data-center financing. Malaysia is a natural first case: it has a mature domestic Islamic finance market and an emerging position as a Southeast Asian hyperscale corridor.
ADB has framed the deal against a stated ambition to mobilize up to US$20 billion by 2035 for digital corridors, data infrastructure and "AI-ready economies" — a target, not a committed sum, and one this single sukuk barely dents. The gap between a US$20 billion ambition and a US$75.8 million first ticket is itself the more honest measure of where the mobilization stands: early, structurally novel, and still proving the instrument before scaling the balance sheet behind it.
Islamic finance has funded roads, hospitals, and sovereign budgets for decades; green-labelled bonds have funded renewable power and efficient buildings for nearly as long. Routed together through a hyperscale data center, they become something narrower and newer: capital statecraft that borrows its plumbing from two distinct capital markets at once, rather than reinventing either.
— Capital Statecraft Intelligence · Compute & Connectivity Desk
Primary source(s): Asian Development Bank press release, 28 July 2026; Sime Darby Property press release, 28 July 2026; The Asset, 30 July 2026