Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
apnews.com
apnews.com
Despite being elected on the promise of reform, the government's actual performance has been anything but. The press is still frequently suppressed; social media platforms are required to obtain a yearly license or risk being fined or shut down. There was even a time when the MCMC—the country’s communications regulatory body—forced all ISPs to route traffic through their DNS instead of allowing users to freely use Google or Cloudflare DNS, enabling government censorship.
On that last point, the MCMC backed down after massive public outcry, but the government's authoritarian tendencies remain palpable.
Speaking of authoritarianism, the current Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, has proudly likened himself to Southeast Asia’s version of Erdogan. And indeed, he seems to be increasingly authoritarian just like Erdogan, curbing free speech while advancing an Islamist agenda. Under his leadership, the country is becoming increasingly intolerant, particularly as the majority Malay Muslims frequently target minorities—sometimes on a near-weekly basis. You might be surprised to learn that socks printed with the word "Allah" resulted in the store owner being charged and penalized in court. Meanwhile, ongoing debates about banning convenience stores from selling liquor in Muslim-majority areas never seem to die down. Non-Muslims remain uncertain about when they might inadvertently face repercussions for perceived "mistakes"—whether intentional or not.
Additionally, Anwar's staunch support for Hamas may not sit well with the current U.S. administration. Whether this will lead to investors pulling out, or somehow trigger the US sanction, remains to be seen.
For example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/social... (there are dozens of such stories)
China of course highly regulates religion and is in no way 'free' in that regard.
Phillipines has an Islamic insurgency.
Malaysia... okay? One country? It's really not looking good for most of the continent at the rate it's going.
That contradicts your thesis. They did listen to feedback from the people, that's democracy.
After Anwar's party took over, one of the first things they did was remove the ban on Medium and the "fake news" laws. They did cut funding to newspapers (which probably a revenge policy). But we're making lots of progress in this space.
Now, before you completely disregard the point I'm making; yes, they did ignore the laws/warnings they were given but your point is that Malaysia is tolerant and my point is that Malaysia is not tolerant at all.
We should call out intolerance when we see it; saying homophobia is a part of their "culture" is not good enough.
If you go to a muslim country and make out with another dude you're making a statement, which is fine. You know what the consequences will be before you do it. Your described scenario is no different from saying using white phosphorus on civilians is bad on stage in the US, which will also land you in incredible trouble.
That's why I _specifically_ made a statement about people missing my point, because I knew someone would, because people _always_ do when it comes to imagining how they would feel if they were persecuted like that.
The point _isn't_ that someone can go there and "break the law". The point _is_ that there was a claim that they are tolerant and I refute that claim by saying that they are not.
Also, I'm surprised that people describe these events as particular occurances. It's a pattern followed all over the world now, including in the US. Who stands up now for freedom, democracy, and the necessary component of those things, toleration?
how can international investor investing in data center where their data is supressed and censor??
Malaysia isn't that cheap for SEA btw. Thailand and Indonesia are probably cheaper.
They've got a wildly unique system of rotating kings if you've never looked into it. Also this could be like a 50 episode series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1Malaysia_Development_Berhad...
This results in large, perfectly spherical, data centre being more difficult to cool, especially when operating in a vacuum.
Massive place requiring a lot of capital expensive submarine cables.
Singapore used to be the obvious location for MNC offices in APAC. Especially since Hong Kong's return to China, Singapore has benefited and see an increase in head offices and employment.
However, over the last couple of decades surrounding countries have improved significantly. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand to name a few. Layer on top the ever increasing cost of living in Singapore and the latest trend is MNCs moving their offices outside of Singapore.
The benefit is a lower cost of operation including office rent and employee wages and it will be interesting to see how the trend continues. Not sure if that will help the process of locating datacenters in those countries as well, I guess we'll see.
Cyberjaya (yes, you can cringe at the name) in Malaysia was built with the explicit goal of attracting them, but it's mostly call centers, not R&D. Even Malaysian success stories like Grab (the SE Asian Uber) prefer to operate out of Singapore.
Some are moving HQ, some are just downsizing HQ and expanding offices in Malaysia or Thailand.
I agree it’s not a wholesale move out, but the trend is noticeable.
There was a disagreement between the co-founders. One wanted to use HVDC cable to transmit power, the other wanted to use electrolysis to produce Hydrogen, put that on ships, then burn it in Singapore to produce electricity.
To resolve the dispute, they both agreed to put the project into administration, then both made bids to take full control, with HVDC proponent Mike Cannon-Brooks (co-founder of Atlassian btw) eventually winning control.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Green hydrogen plan eventually makes a come back, as solar power from Northern Australia has a compellingly low LCOE.
Many of those dams are full to excess, at least sometimes. And what Twiggy doesn’t waste turning falling water in to energy anaemic hydrogen gas, ammonia is handy though, we can keep selling to Victoria for a profit, for the Tasmanian government to, what, waste on a footy stadium no one wants? No no, to waste storing the new Spirit of Scotland ferries.
Cynical bugger.
It’s a Utopia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3XUn-EsThcE
(That video was uploaded a year ago but the episode the clip is from aired years before the new stadium was even proposed. And that’s not the only time that the TV show predicted a useless government project)
I'm a little surprised Singapore approved it, as it'll need to supply about 10% of Singapore's power in order to cover the cost of the cable, which seems like a big vulnerability to me.
Next question is, can they find enough buyers in Singapore for that much power.
Pretty big challenge for Singapore to figure out a way to guarantee security long term.
Singapore, unlike Japan, is very attractive from a geopolitical standpoint as it is one of the few places that's friendly to both the West and to China, making it uniquely suited to doing business with both.
Colo costs are 2x to 5x that of the US, depending on your power density requirements.
Absolutely no one is deploying racks to SEA to save money. They are only doing it only to reduce latency to SEA customers.
Its advantage is that it has ample sunshine and over the past few years, the government has introduced various incentives for promoting residential and commercial solar energy investments
One can learn more about it from their renewal energy roadmap website https://www.seda.gov.my/reportal/
Most of the renewables come from hydro and biomass/biodiesel (lots of plantations too). Malaysia is still about 50% powered by natural gas, but it's gone down from 70% in 2000.
You want to make data center close as possible to your customer
> Tech companies exploiting resources in poorer countries while extracting data from their populations to get rich is akin to “digital colonialism.” She compared data extraction to silver mining in Bolivia, which enriched colonial Spain but left nothing behind for Latin America. “They are extracting data in the same way. Data doesn’t even leave (behind) taxes,” she said.
1) Data collection and data mining are very different from data centers, but good luck explaining that to the layman.
2) Malaysia's economic problems are largely due to dysfunctional government including racial preferences baked into the constitution, coupled with the resource curse, meaning exports of oil/LNG fund all sorts of wasteful spending and crowd out other businesses. "Digital colonialism" is the least of their worries.
3) Last but not least, 60% of SE Asia's data centers are in Singapore, which is wealthier than the Western countries that, per the article, are apparently exploiting it.
Even if you solve all the worlds problemns, journalists would just stretch the truth further to find new things to be outraged about to keep the readers "happy".
2 in particular is huge.
It's super weird seeing my country make headlines, but only in a way where I don't recognize the place they're talking about at all.
If the government is authoritarian, they could be bribed. Remember the US government now says bribery is ok.
See also how does Geely control Proton.
Malaysia has an opportunity simply because Singapore can't keep up. It doesn't have the land to waste on data centers, nor does it have the spare power generation capacity.
Malasia doesn’t have the spare power either and neither does it have the capacity to keep the power clean, that’s what is being argued in the article. Poor countries will always take up a business opportunity to make money because they are poor. That doesn’t fix the problem that the business opportunity could do plenty of harm to the country in other ways. Just like Malaysia and other South Asian countries import more garbage than they can process from first world countries because that brings in money for them.
It's just a matter of investment. If anything, the stable power demands from datacenters make business case for new builds stronger.
Also, it's not like these datacenters are serving western customers. These datacenters are far MORE costly than those in the EU/US because of the higher cooling costs, and also the latency is more than 200ms to the EU and US making them not suitable for real time use cases.
This story is nothing but a contrived whingefest, like much of the media these days.
I work for one of the top datacenter companies in the world and we run 8TWh on 96% renewable energy.
Actually it does. Taking business opportunities to make money is the main way that poor countries become rich. If you block them off from that they don't find harmless ways to make money (any conceivable way for a poor country to make money can be painted as getting exploited if you're that way inclined), they just stay poor.
As someone from a certain poor country, I can attest that your tone sounds very condescending. It makes it look like such countries lack the agency to choose for themselves and need a savior to swoop in and rescue them from their predicament.
You do know there are latency issues when servicing the Western countries from Asia, right?
make it make sense.
So you get construction ...
But staffing after that, most big data-centers really focus on having as little staffing as possible. They're big, but I don't think they are big employers. I used to visit some BIG data centers that were largely unmanned.
They claimed that the fact that Singapore imports so many GPUs despite a moratorium on data centers was evidence of China smuggling GPUs. Of course it’s impossible to prove a negative, but it seems a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that Malaysia, on the other side of a river, has a growing data center industry.
The technical aspects of the podcast regarding DeepSeek, which I’m more familiar with, were accurate as far as I can tell.
Reminded me of the Belarusian shrim export suddenly soaring[1] after sanctions against Russian started.
For those who aren't too familiar with European geography, a look at the map[2] gives an indication as to why that's rather suspicious.
[1]: https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus#/media/File:Europe-Bel...
Singapore only has about 2% of global data center capacity. It's floor space, power and transit costs are at least twice that of the US and EU making it an unattractive place to do model training.
Nonethless, it accounted for 28% of NVIDIAs datacenter GPU sales.
Let’s call the dollars per square foot the “cost density”. The claim you are repeating from the interview I mentioned is that SG data centers have an unusually high cost density.
What could account for that? It might be that there is a very expensive item (a state of the art GPU for example) taking up that space.
Another option, as I mentioned above, is that these GPUs are running inference in Malaysia which is right across the river.
Why wouldn't DeepSeek (or whoever) just export these to Northern China where power is cheap and the air is cold?
Also, if you have been to Singapore, these are not people who are at all afraid of using air conditioning.
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
Singapore holds the headquarters of a lot of SEA megacorporations, as well as regional HQs of big tech in both USA/China.
These chips are bought from these HQs and redistributed to the rest of the world (Singapore is a major shipping hub). India imports chips through their HQs in Singapore, so does Australia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, America, etc.
Maybe you could make the case that shady companies are exporting to China, but I am fairly skeptical as there are already American officials in Singapore collaborating to investigating this issue
This makes me skeptical of your other claims. Do you have evidence that most of the rest of the world for some reason routes their GPU imports through Singapore? That seems quite pointless.
Most stuff shipped from Taiwan to America goes via Singapore at least physically. It's the big shipping hub in the region.
Certainly the tendency for people here to reach for the most conspiratorial theories is bizarre to me.
Singapore placed a moratorium on new data center construction from 2019 to early 2022. It was not a "15-year moratorium" as Patel claimed, so he was pulling numbers out of his behind. Since 2022 Singapore has been expanding DC capacity quite aggressively as well: https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/business-insights/insights/singapo...
The fact that Patel didn't bother to verify something so easily Googleable speaks volumes about his credibility.
And here's a statement by NVIDIA:
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
Honestly many of the things Patel said in that podcast (not just about Singapore, but in general) belonged on r/ConfidentlyIncorrect.