Malaysia’s palm oil giants, long criticised for deforestation, haze and threats to wildlife, are repositioning themselves as unlikely players in the country’s booming AI data centre market, according to a report by Bloomberg.
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 hogs,” the report noted. “By 2035, they could demand at least five gigawatts 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 noted that Malaysia 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 Southeast Asia is now slated for Malaysia, according to industry consultant DC Byte.”
It also pointed out that over the past four years, US$34 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.
