Transcription
[Music] Today on Forbes, the Asian billionaires riding the data center boom.
Nestled in the foothills of Mount Pulai in Malaysia's southern state of Jor and surrounded by palm oil plantations, four windowless singlestory buildings emit a steady drone 24/7. This comes from powerful supercomputers simultaneously running cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications. Some using Nvidia's most advanced GB200 chips capable of processing 1.8 terabytes of information per second. These GPUs are housed in a 20 megawatt facility within a 664 hectare data center park operated by YTL Power International, the utility unit of Malaysian tycoon Franciso's YTL conglomerate. Inside the building are 3 meter tall fans blowing cold air onto rows of server racks interconnected by kilometers of cables.
Two years ago, the American chip giant announced a $4.3 billion plan to develop AI infrastructure with YTL and Jor, of which $2.4 billion has already been spent, building 200 megawatts of data center capacity. The high-profile collaboration vindicated YTL's 2021 bet on the business. In a video call from the group's headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Yo Kiang Han, YTL Power's executive director and the elder Yo's nephew recalls, "People said we were crazy to think we could build the equivalent of Singapore's total data center capacity in Jor."
YTL's timing was fortuitous, dovetailing with Malaysia's ambitions to become a digital hub. And Jor, blessed with plentiful land, electricity and water, key essentials for data centers, emerged as a hot spot at the Senai Tech Park, 28 km northwest of the YTL complex. Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuok's K2 Strategic, helmed by his 42-year-old grandson, Kuok Meng, aims to quadruple its data center capacity in Malaysia to 240 megawatts in a few years.
After a meeting with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and YTL Power managing director Yeoh Seok Hong at the APEC Summit in South Korea last month, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said, "Malaysia aims to become a leading AI nation by 2030, leveraging AI to boost productivity, enhance public services, and build a sustainable, inclusive, and ethical digital economy." The country's aspiration to overtake neighboring Singapore in data center capacity, which analysts forecast could be achieved over the next 5 years, is fueled by the AI boom that in turn has sparked a frenzied global buildout of AI infrastructure.
While the US has sprinted ahead, the Asia-Pacific region is catching up. According to Chicago-based real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield, global tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft are pouring an estimated $240 billion in the next 5 years to expand their hyperscale footprint in the Asia-Pacific. This massive outlay together with investments by regional players is expected to more than double data center capacity across the region to more than 29 gigawatts by 2030 from 12 gigawatts in 2024. According to Cushman & Wakefield, by the end of the decade, the region could well be the world's second largest data center market, next only to the 32 gigawatt capacity that will be created in the Americas.
Drawn by the potential, several of Asia's leading tycoons and conglomerates have jumped into the race. In India, Gautam Adani's flagship Adani Enterprises together with Alphabet's Google is investing $15 billion over the next 5 years to develop what it claims will be the country's largest data center campus in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh. No less ambitious is the plan by India's richest person, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries to build a 1 gigawatt AI data center in the western Indian state of Gujarat as it develops AI platforms with Google and Facebook parent Meta Platforms. In August, Ambani told shareholders, "We are making all of our businesses AI-native, positioning them for hypergrowth."
High-profile collaborations are being forged across the region. South Korea was in the spotlight earlier this year when chips billionaire Choi Tae-won's SK Group teamed up with Amazon Web Services to invest $5 billion to build a data center in Ulsan, an automotive industry hub south of Seoul. Kim Beom-su's messaging app Kakao, which forged a partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI, is building a $438 million facility northeast of the capital. J.Y. Lee's semiconductor giant Samsung Electronics is developing memory chips for OpenAI and jointly building data centers in the country. In Taiwan, Terry Gou's Foxconn and Nvidia are investing $1.4 billion to build a 100 megawatt AI data center.
For full coverage, check out Jonathan Burgos's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
[Music]