Malaysia gave conditional approvals in February for building and managing hyper-scale data centres and to provide cloud services
Microsoft Corp. is all geared up to set up hyper-scale data centres in Malaysia. The prime minister of the Southeast Asian nation, on Monday said that the company, as part of a new partnership programme with government agencies and local companies, will invest $1 billion over the next five years.
The announcement on the US tech giant’s biggest investment in the country comes after Malaysia gave conditional approvals in February for Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com Inc. and state telecoms firm Telekom Malaysia Bhd. The approval was given for building and managing hyper-scale data centres and to provide cloud services.
Also, it comes after the country saw foreign direct investments (FDI) plunge by 68 per cent last year, the biggest decline in Southeast Asia. With the finance minister recently saying it was looking at incentives to help attract more FDI, Malaysia has defended itself as an investment destination. It has said that over the next five years, the investments from these cloud service providers will total between 12 billion ringgit and 15 billion ringgit ($2.91 billion to $3.64 billion).
As part of the Bersama Malaysia initiative, Microsoft, to manage data from various countries, will establish its first “data centre region”, which consists of multiple hyper-scale data centres, Muhyiddin Yassin, the prime minister of the country told an event marking the launch of the programme.
“The upcoming data centre region will be a game-changer for Malaysia,” Microsoft Executive Vice President Jean-Philippe Courtois said in a statement, adding it will enable the government and businesses to “transform” their operations.
Under the programme, Microsoft will also assist up to a million Malaysians in getting digital skills by the end of 2023.
Also read:Robots becoming an important part of the marketing industry
Do Follow: CIO News LinkedIn Account | CIO News Facebook | CIO News Youtube | CIO News Twitter
