Bintan is inside the Galang Batang Special Economic Zone, roughly the same distance from Singapore as a drive across Johor. The Nongsa–Changi submarine cable already lands Bintan and Changi, with 24 fibre pairs and a second route through the Batam ring.
FIG. 02 · OpenStreetMap · teal Nongsa–Changi primary · amber Batam ring · both routes flow the full path
One way from a Bintan rack to a Changi cage is roughly 0.9 ms of fibre. Round trip with a switch hop lands under 2 ms. That is enough for inference, storage replication and orchestration. It is not enough to put a hot keystroke loop on the far side, which is why the front office stays in Singapore.
Planning estimates, round trip from a campus rack over the primary route. We will run your actual paths in a test build before you commit.
Inference and training traffic tolerate this range comfortably. Anything user facing, anything with a tight latency SLA, anything that needs to sit inside a Singapore cage, stays in Singapore.
Sales and contract signatures, trading and financial workloads, cloud networking, interactive inference, anything with a hard latency promise. Keep it in the jurisdiction your users and regulators expect.
Existing colocation stock, familiar landlords, no migration cost.
Pre-training runs, bulk inference, rendering, data pipelines, anything that wants 20MW at a time and does not care where the packets physically land. That is the work that needs power, floor area and water, and Bintan has all three without a queue.
Split-run pattern. Control plane in Singapore, data plane on Bintan.
A July 2026 presidential instruction names Batam and Bintan a priority corridor for the digital economy and data centres. Filing as a sovereign AI campus puts the licence through a faster track.
Full foreign ownership with no local equity requirement. AI servers, networking and M&E equipment land at 0% import duty and 0% VAT, on top of a multi-year corporate income tax holiday.
Simplified review for construction plans and water abstraction. The SEZ authority runs a dedicated task group to hold the Q4 2027 first energisation date.