Malaysia aims to attract major players like Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, emphasizing the country’s effort to establish itself as a prominent data center hub.
According to Investment, Trade and Industry Minister Zafrul Abdul Aziz during an interview with Bloomberg Television, Malaysia is slowly establishing itself as the hub for data center and will continue efforts to attract major industry players such as Microsoft and Google to have a presence in the country.
“We are attracting as many as we can,” said Zafrul.
“We are seeing a lot of realignment in supply chain, looking at resiliency and security coming to this region,” he added.
The Malaysian data center industry is expected to continue its upward trend in the coming years. According to Arizton’s research, the data center market in Malaysia is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.41% during the 2022-2028 period.
Malaysia has witnessed a surge of activity within the data center industry.
Australia’s NEXTDC Ltd recently announced plans to invest RM3 billion in the development of Kuala Lumpur 1 (KL1), a Tier IV-certified data center. It is NEXTDC’s first step into Asia.
In April, MN Holdings Bhd announced its partnership with China’s Shanghai DC-Science Co Ltd to work together on building a high performance data center in Johor. The project is valued at an estimated US$600 million. The data center has been planned to include a 12,000-rack facility supported by a power load of 120MW, and dual power supply.
In March this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it will be investing RM25.5 billion in Malaysia to develop its cloud services infrastructure in the country.
In January, AirTrunk, an Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) hyperscale data center specialist, announced its entry into Malaysia with plans to develop a 150+MW data center named AirTrunk JHB1 (JHB1) which will be the company’s first in Malaysia and ninth in APJ, taking its data center platform to over 1.35GW of capacity.
Other leading data center providers in Malaysia include AIMS DC, Bridge DC, TM One, NTT Communications, Strateq, Basis Bay, HDC and others. There are over 20 data centers in the country. With Cyberjaya and Johor positioned as known hubs in Malaysia.
