Jatiluhur data centre pause shows AMDAL pricing in the value of a strategic reservoir

West Java has paused one of its largest digital investments of the year so that a reservoir of national importance can be properly assessed first. On Monday 28 September 2026, Governor Dedi Mulyadi, widely known as KDM, inspected the construction site of an artificial intelligence data centre being built by BDX Data Centers in the Jatiluhur area of Purwakarta Regency. Finding that the project did not yet hold its Environmental Impact Analysis (AMDAL) or its Building Approval (Persetujuan Bangunan Gedung, PBG), he asked for construction to stop until both are in place.

The decision has been widely reported as a halt, but the governor's own framing is more constructive. The project, valued at about Rp3.5 trillion, has not been rejected. It can continue once the assessment is complete and passes. That makes the Jatiluhur case a clear example of what AMDAL is designed to do: put a value on the water and ecosystem services that a place provides before new demand is placed on them, rather than after.

What happened at Jatiluhur

According to ANTARA and Liputan6, construction on the site began on 22 September 2026 on land of around 8,000 square metres. detikJabar reported that this plot sits within a development zone of about 11 hectares and that the facility is planned to start at 120 megawatts (MW) of electrical capacity, with expansion up to 640 MW. The head of the West Java Communication and Informatics Office, Mas Adi Komar, told Kompas that work had been paused since the governor's site visit on 28 September.

The governor's instruction was short and direct. As reported by ANTARA, he said that the PBG and AMDAL had not yet been issued, and that the project should not proceed until they were. The concerns he listed included potential noise for nearby residents, the possibility of water stress for farmers, the risk of legal disputes, and the potential for serious environmental damage if the project went ahead without an assessment.

In a follow up statement reported by ANTARA on 2 October, the governor placed the cause of the gap with the project's consultant, saying that by the time of his visit the consultant had not yet submitted the required data. He was equally clear that the pause is procedural rather than a judgement on the investment itself. In remarks reported by Suara Jabar on 3 October, he rejected the idea that the project was being held back by bureaucracy, and set out the conditions for it to continue: a completed AMDAL, a building approval, and assurance that Purwakarta residents' access to water would not be affected.

If the AMDAL objectively passes, then I have no problem with it going ahead. Governor Dedi Mulyadi, as reported by detikJabar

To support an objective review, the provincial government has asked academics from Universitas Indonesia to assess the project, according to ANTARA and detikJabar. Both the AMDAL and the PBG fall under the authority of the Purwakarta Regency Government.

The water numbers behind the decision

The water figures explain why this particular site called for care. At full operation, the data centre is expected to need about 384 litres of water per second, which ANTARA, Kompas, and Liputan6 equate to roughly 33,000 cubic metres per day. During the early construction phase, the requirement is around 6,000 cubic metres per day. detikJabar also cited a rounded project demand of 400 litres per second in one passage.

The governor placed these figures against the raw water allocation that the regional water utility, PDAM Purwakarta, holds from the Jatiluhur reservoir. That allocation is 3,000 litres per second, of which around 380 litres per second is currently in use. The governor described current use as about 11 percent of the allocation and the data centre's need as about 14 percent, leaving roughly 75 percent of the allocation unused even with the project included.

Sirkularium notes a small difference in the arithmetic. Dividing 380 by 3,000 gives about 12.7 percent, and 384 by 3,000 gives about 12.8 percent. Using the 400 litres per second figure, the project share is about 13.3 percent. The combined share therefore sits at roughly a quarter of the allocation under any of these readings, consistent with the governor's overall point that the allocation has room. The differences are worth resolving in the AMDAL so that all parties work from a single agreed figure.

Independent benchmarks support the scale of the request. CNBC Indonesia, citing the World Economic Forum, reported that a 1 MW data centre can use up to 25.5 million litres of water a year for cooling. Applied to the full 640 MW, that benchmark implies around 16.3 million cubic metres a year, while 33,000 cubic metres a day over a full year is about 12 million cubic metres. The two estimates sit in the same range, which suggests the project's own figure is realistic for a facility of this size. Actual use will depend on the cooling technology chosen, which is exactly the kind of design choice an AMDAL can influence.

Why Jatiluhur is a strategic water asset

Jatiluhur is not an ordinary reservoir. Built on the Citarum River and completed in 1965, the dam has a design storage capacity of around 3 billion cubic metres, the largest in the country, and a surface area of about 83 square kilometres, according to reference data. It is managed by the state water enterprise Perum Jasa Tirta II and serves several uses at once.

The first is food. The Jatiluhur system irrigates about 240,000 hectares of rice fields in northern West Java, served through the Tarum Barat, Tarum Utara, and Tarum Timur canals. Earlier reporting on Perum Jasa Tirta II broke this down as 39,718 hectares on Tarum Barat, 100,768 hectares on Tarum Utara, and 79,855 hectares on Tarum Timur.

The second is drinking water for the capital. Perum Jasa Tirta II has described Jatiluhur as the source of about 80 percent of the raw water for Jakarta's drinking water supply, delivered through the Tarum Barat channel. The third is electricity, through a hydropower plant of roughly 186.5 MW installed capacity. The reservoir also supports flood control and freshwater aquaculture.

These services are sensitive to the dry season. Kompas reported on 5 August 2026 that the reservoir level fell 7.42 metres in 58 days, from 106.79 metres above sea level on 8 June to 99.37 metres on 5 August, when effective storage stood at 857.10 million cubic metres. Perum Jasa Tirta II Director General Imam Santoso said at the time that the dry season calls for adaptive and integrated water resource management, and the operator used rotational distribution and weather modification to keep supply flowing for power, irrigation, and industry.

A reservoir that feeds rice fields, a capital city, and a power plant at the same time is a shared asset. Any new user should be sized against the dry season, not the wet one.

How AMDAL puts a price on ecosystem services

An AMDAL is often seen as a permit to be obtained. It is more useful to see it as a valuation exercise carried out before capital is committed. For a project drawing on Jatiluhur, a sound assessment would ask how much water the facility will take in a dry year, where its return flows and heat will go, how its use interacts with irrigation schedules and the Jakarta supply, and what happens to the surrounding catchment and land use.

Each of these questions maps onto an ecosystem service that can be measured and valued. Water provisioning can be valued through the cost of the next best source of raw water. Regulation of flow and sediment by the upstream catchment can be valued through avoided dredging and treatment costs. Irrigation can be valued through the rice output it secures. Hydropower can be valued through the generation it supports. Indonesia already has a regulatory method for monetising environmental change, set out in Permen LH Number 7 of 2014 on environmental losses, which gives a standard framework for this kind of calculation.

Seen this way, the governor's request for an objective academic review is good practice. It means the project's water draw will be weighed against these values transparently, and the result will give the investor, PDAM Purwakarta, Perum Jasa Tirta II, and farmers a shared basis for decisions. It also gives the investor something valuable: a defensible licence to operate at a site where water will remain a closely watched resource.

Sirkularium's view

The Jatiluhur pause is a sign of the system working as intended. A provincial government noticed a gap in environmental approval, acted quickly, explained its reasons, kept the door open to the investment, and brought in independent expertise. That combination protects a strategic water asset while signalling to investors that West Java welcomes data centres on clear and predictable terms.

For the regency, the province, and the project team, three steps would turn this episode into a model for future data centre siting. First, base the AMDAL water analysis on dry season conditions and on a single agreed allocation figure, resolving the small differences in the percentages reported so far. Second, include an ecosystem services valuation of the reservoir and its catchment, covering water supply, irrigation, hydropower, and flow regulation, using Permen LH Number 7 of 2014 as the reference method. Third, make cooling technology part of the approval conversation, since closed loop or low water designs can reduce demand substantially and make the project easier to approve.

Sirkularium sees AMDAL as the point where natural capital enters the investment case, and recommends that regions courting digital infrastructure prepare water and ecosystem baselines for candidate sites in advance, so that projects can move quickly once they arrive. What to watch next: the findings of the Universitas Indonesia review, the timing of the Purwakarta Regency decisions on the AMDAL and PBG, and whether the project adopts a cooling design that lowers its draw on Jatiluhur.