Another huge investment into Asia to expand data centre and cloud reach, as Oracle pledges $6.5 billion for Malaysia
The trend of cloud giants making huge investments in a number of Asian countries continues – this time with Oracle pledging to spend billions of dollars in Malaysia.
Oracle announced on Wednesday that it will invest more than $6 billion in AI and cloud computing in Malaysia, and will open a cloud region in that country. The Oracle investment could be one of the largest investments in Malaysia.
But it not just Malaysia that has piqued the interest of Larry Ellison’s tech giant. Oracle in April this year announced it will invest more than $8 billion in Japan over the next 10 years, in order to grow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) footprint across that country.
Oracle Malaysia
But this week Oracle said that its $6 billion investment in Malaysia will allow it to open a cloud region there, as well as offer “150+ infrastructure and SaaS services, to help boost the country’s digital economy and drive AI-fueled innovation.”
Oracle said the huge investment comes as it seeks to meet the rapidly growing demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services in Malaysia.
According to Oracle, the planned public cloud region will help organisations in Malaysia modernise their applications, migrate all types of workloads to the cloud, and innovate with data, analytics, and AI.
Local customers will have access to OCI Generative AI Agents with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities; accelerated computing and generative AI services to help keep sovereign AI models within country borders – an important issue for government agencies.
Local organisations and business meanwhile will also have access to OCI Supercluster, which is claimed to be the largest AI supercomputer.
“We warmly welcome Oracle’s US$6.5 billion investment in Malaysia, which represents yet another expansion of their 36-year footprint in Malaysia,” said YB Senator Tengku Datuk Seri Utama Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz, minister of investment, trade and industry (MITI), Malaysia.
“This investment will empower Malaysian entities, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, with innovative and cutting-edge AI and cloud technologies to enhance their global competitiveness,” said the Senator.
“Malaysia offers unique growth opportunities for organizations looking to accelerate their expansion with the latest digital technologies,” added Garrett Ilg, executive VP and general manager, Japan & Asia Pacific, Oracle. “Our multi-billion dollar investment affirms our commitment to Malaysia as a regional gateway for cloud infrastructure as well as a comprehensive suite of SaaS applications deployed within Malaysia.”
Asia investments
Oracle is not alone in making significant investments in Asia and Malaysia.
Rivals including Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, Google and China’s ByteDance have announced billions of dollars worth of digital investments into Malaysia since last year, centring around cloud and data centres.
In the past year for example, Microsoft has announced investments in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, while Amazon has also announced plans to invest $9 billion in Singapore and $5 billion in Thailand.
Google on Tuesday broke ground on a $2 billion data centre in Malaysia, and this week announced it will invest $1 billion in Thailand to build a new data centre and accelerate AI growth.
