Malaysia Rides AI Wave to Capture Data Center Investment

Malaysia’s data center sector is on a tear, with investment surging threefold in 2024. Data center firms committed MYR141.7 billion ($31.5 billion) in just the first 10 months of last year, up from MYR46.2 billion ($10.3 billion) over 2023, property consultancy Knight Frank has found.

The bulk of this came from tech giants: $4.3 billion from Nvidia, $2.2 billion from Microsoft, $2.1 billion from ByteDance, $2 billion from Google, and $6 billion through to 2038 from AWS.

Malaysia is already the biggest data center player in Southeast Asia, with 429 MW of capacity, way ahead of the second biggest, Indonesia, with 93MW.

The underlying driver in this flood of investment is the colossal pool of cash flooding into AI. The ASEAN region, with its population of 700 million and fast-growing digital services, is an attractive target both for western giants and their Chinese counterparts.

But it is also due to the Malaysian government’s efforts to advance its digital economy. 

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