A feature by The Malaysian reserve noted that the artificial intelligence is turning Malaysia’s palm estates into data centres.
“MALAYSIA’S palm oil giants, long blamed for razing rainforests, fuelling toxic haze and driving orangutans to the brink of extinction, are recasting themselves as unlikely champions in a different, potentially greener race: The quest to lure the world’s artificial intelligence (AI) data centres to the Southeast Asian country,’ it noted.
“Palm oil companies are earmarking some of the vast tracts of land they own for industrial parks studded with data centres and solar panels, the latter meant to feed the insatiable energy appetites of the former. The logic is simple: Data centres are power and land hog,” the article noted.
By 2035, it said, they could demand at least five gigawatts (GW) of electricity in Malaysia — almost 20% of the country’s current generation capacity and roughly enough to power a major city like Miami.
“Malaysia also needs space to house server farms and palm oil giants control more land than any other private entity in the country,” it pointed out.
The country has been at the heart of a regional data centre boom. Last year, it was the fastest-growing data centre market in the Asia-Pacific region and roughly 40% of all planned capacity in South-East Asia is now slated for Malaysia, according to industry consultant DC Byte Ltd.
“Over the past four years, US$34 billion (RM141 billion) in data centre investments has poured into the country — Alphabet Inc’s Google committed US$2 billion, Microsoft Corp announced a US$2.2 billion investment and Amazon.com Inc is spending US$6.2 billion, to name a few. The government aims for 81 data centres by 2035,” it said.
