Oracle to set up public cloud region in Malaysia

Oracle will invest more than US$ 6.5 billion to open a public cloud region in Malaysia, echoing the decisions made by AWS, Google and Microsoft to set up their infrastructures in the country as well.

With demand for AI and cloud services in the region and Malaysia growing exponentially, Oracle has announced plans to invest more than US$6.5 billion to open a public cloud region in the country. Oracle becomes the latest tech giant to set up a data center and cloud region in Malaysia following similar investments made by Google, AWS, NVIDIA and Microsoft recently.

The new cloud region is expected to benefit Oracle customers and partners in the country, specifically in leveraging AI infrastructure services as well as migrate mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This includes providing customers with access to OCI Generative AI agents with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities and also the ability to accelerate computing and generative AI services to help keep sovereign AI models within the country.

According to Garrett Iig, executive vice president and general manager in Japan and Asia Pacific for Oracle, Malaysia offers unique growth opportunities for organizations looking to accelerate their expansion with the latest 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,” said Iig.

Customers will also have access to OCI Supercluster which is the largest AI supercomputer in the cloud. In addition, more than 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 made available.

AI driving demand

It’s no surprise that the increasing adoption of AI by organizations in the region has contributed to the growth of data centers in the region. In fact, IDC expected the surging demand for AI workloads will only lead to a significant increase not only in data center capacity but also in energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The IDC FutureScape ‘The Infrastructure and Cloud Impact 2024 Predictions predicts Malaysia’s public cloud services market to grow by 27.2% from 2022 to 2027. Franco Chiam, vice president for cloud and data center and future digital infrastructure at Asia Pacific IDC believes that the upcoming Oracle cloud region in Malaysia signals the country’s potential to become a hub for technological innovation and growth in the region.

Malaysia has already recorded huge tech investments, with the country becoming a data center powerhouse not just in Southeast Asia but in the entire continent. While AI has been driving demand, part of the growth is also contributed to the government’s initiatives in providing the required infrastructure and facilities that cater to the building and running of data centers in the country.

At the same time, Oracle also stated that several NVIDIA AI infrastructure services will be available to customers as well. This includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

NVIDIA’s Dennis Ang, who is senior director for enteprise business in ASEAN and ANZ region said 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.

Interestingly, Oracle did not reveal when the data center will be ready not the the exact location of where the data center will be built. However, The Malaysian government expects the project to contribute to the country’s New Industrial Master Plan vision by creating more smart factories and jobs by 2030.