MALAYSIA'S AI LEVERAGE

Across a stretch of southern Malaysia once carpeted with palm-oil and pineapple plantations, signs of China’s global technology ambitions are taking shape.

More than 15 cranes tower over 100 acres of excavated earth, where DayOne, a company with corporate roots in one of China’s biggest data center operators, is building a sprawling complex. A short drive away, at the edge of dense tropical forest, hundreds of workers are completing another facility expected to serve Chinese tech companies.

Inside these data centers will be some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips. The semiconductors, made by Nvidia, are largely banned from shipment to China under American export controls. Yet those restrictions generally do not prevent Chinese companies like ByteDance — DayOne’s biggest customer — from gaining access to the same chips in data centers outside China.

That distinction has helped turn Malaysia, a country of 35 million people, into an unlikely frontier of the A.I. boom. Drawn by cheap land and electricity, and proximity to undersea cables that carry internet traffic to China and the rest of the world, technology companies are pouring billions of dollars into the country.

Malaysia has carved out an uncommon position in an A.I. industry increasingly divided along geopolitical lines between China and the United States. Rather than choosing sides, it has welcomed both.

The frenzy has reshaped Malaysia’s economy and landscape, raised fears about strains on electricity and water supplies, and drawn scrutiny from American officials concerned about Chinese access to advanced A.I. chips.

Nowhere is that transformation more striking than in Johor, the southern state at the center of the building boom. Across the state, 65 data center projects are operational, under construction or in various stages of planning and approval.

The facilities already consume more than two gigawatts of electricity, enough to power more than one-third of Malaysian homes. If all planned projects are completed, demand could exceed 10 gigawatts, according to Invest Johor, a state agency, making it one of the world’s largest concentrations of computing power. Chinese and Western tech companies are expected to account for roughly equal shares of that capacity.

“This is really mind-boggling and beyond imagination,” said Steven Tan, chief executive of Pro3c, a Taiwanese company that makes optical parts for Nvidia chips. “Everyone is coming here.”

American technology giants, including Microsoft, Google and Oracle, are investing heavily in Malaysia to be closer to Asian customers. At the same time, the country has become an offshore computing hub for Chinese companies like ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba. In some of Johor’s industrial parks, infrastructure serving American and Chinese companies is being built almost side by side.

- Authors: Adam Satariano and Xinyun Wu, The New York Time

Read more...