Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Oracle, a cloud technology firm, has recently unveiled its investment plans in Malaysia with the goal of addressing the increasing demand for its artificial intelligence and cloud services in the country.
According to the firm, Oracle plans to invest over US$6.5b to open a public cloud region designed for their customers and partners in Malaysia to utilise AI infrastructure and services and migrate mission-critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The said initiative will also assist Malaysia-based organisations in modernising their applications, migrating all types of workloads to the cloud, and innovating with data, analytics, and AI.
With this, customers can now gain 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; and OCI Supercluster, the largest AI supercomputer in the cloud—orderable with up to 131,072 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with NVIDIA ConnectX-7 NICs for RoCEv2 networking or NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack solutions using liquid cooling and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
Furthermore, 150+ services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, HeatWave MySQL Database Service, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI Kubernetes Engine, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, will also be available, providing customers infrastructure, platform, or SaaS services.
Additionally, customers and partners can also benefit from low-latency access to cloud services to help them derive better value from their data and securely store data and run applications to help address regulations and requirements for data residency within Malaysia.
OCI’s sovereign AI capabilities offer customers increased control over where they locate their data and computing infrastructure and how they manage it. This approach enables customers to achieve AI sovereignty by gaining the assurance that their use of AI is aligned with digital sovereignty frameworks.
YB Senator Tengku Datuk Seri Utama Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz, minister of investment at trade and industry (MITI), Malaysia, said, “We warmly welcome Oracle’s US$6.5 billion investment in Malaysia, which represents yet another expansion of their 36-year footprint in 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.”
“It is also a significant step towards realising the country’s New Industrial Master Plan’s ambitious vision of creating 3,000 smart factories by 2030. Oracle’s decision to establish a public cloud region in Malaysia underscores Malaysia’s infrastructure readiness and its growing position as a premier Southeast Asian destination for digital investments,” he further continued.
Garrett Ilg, executive vice president and general manager, Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle, also remarked, “Malaysia offers unique growth opportunities for organisations looking to accelerate their expansion with the latest digital technologies. 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.”
Meanwhile, Franco Chiam, vice president, cloud, data centre, and future digital infrastructure, Asia Pacific at IDC, said, “Rapidly growing demand for AI services prompts calls for more data centres that store large amounts of data and computational power to train and deploy AI models. According to IDC FutureScape ‘The Infrastructure and Cloud Impact 2024 Predictions’, Malaysia’s public cloud services market is expected to grow by 27.2 percent CAGR from 2022 to 2027. The upcoming Oracle cloud region in Malaysia, therefore, signals the country’s potential to become a hub for technological innovation and growth in Southeast Asia.”
Dennis Ang, senior director, enterprise business (ASEAN and ANZ region) at NVIDIA, commented, “NVIDIA underpins the world’s largest AI models for training and inferencing, and Oracle’s continued expansion in Malaysia will help organisations across the country harness the power of AI. With the new Oracle Cloud Malaysia Region, customers in Malaysia will gain local access to NVIDIA’s accelerated, secure, and scalable platform for end-to-end AI development and deployment on OCI, helping accelerate the development of generative AI applications.”
