Malaysia is emerging as a data center powerhouse amid booming demand from AI
A large hallway with supercomputers inside a server room data center.
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Malaysia is emerging as a data center powerhouse in Southeast Asia and the continent more broadly as demand surges for cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Over the past few years, the country has attracted billions of dollars in data center investments, including from tech giants like Google, Nvidia and Microsoft.
Much of the investments have been in the small city of Johor Bahru, located on the border with Singapore, according to James Murphy, APAC managing director at data center intelligence company DC Byte.
“It looks like in the space of a couple of years, [Johor Bahru] alone will overtake Singapore to become the largest market in Southeast Asia from a base of essentially zero just two years ago,” he said.
Johor Bahru was named as the fastest growing market within Southeast Asia in DC Byte’s 2024 Global Data Centre Index.
The report said the city has 1.6 gigawatts of total data center supply, including projects under construction, committed to or in the early stages of planning. Data center capacity is typically measured by the amount of electricity it consumes.
If all planned capacity comes online across Asia, Malaysia will only be surpassed by the larger countries of Japan and India. Until then, Japan followed by Singapore currently lead the region in terms of live data center capacity.
The index did not provide a detailed breakdown of data center capacity in China.
Shifting demand
The vast majority of data center infrastructure and storage investments have traditionally gone to the established markets of Japan and Singapore, as well as Hong Kong.
However, the global pandemic expedited the world’s digital transformation and cloud adoption, leading to surges of demand for cloud providers in emerging markets like Malaysia and India, according to a report from global data center provider EdgeConneX.
“Increased demand for video streaming, data storage, and anything done over the internet or on a phone, essentially means that there’s going to be more need for data centers,” said Murphy.
Booming demand for AI services also requires specialized data centers to house the large amounts of data and computational power required to train and deploy AI models.
While many of these AI data centers will be built in established markets such as Japan, Murphy said emerging markets will also attract investments due to favorable characteristics.
AI data centers require a lot of space, energy and water for cooling. Therefore, emerging markets such as Malaysia — where energy and land are cheap — provide advantages over smaller city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore, where such resources are limited.
Spillover from Singapore
Thus, a lot of investment and planned capacity has been redirected from Singapore to the bordering Johor Bahru over the years.
Singapore recently changed its tune and laid out a roadmap to grow its data center capacity by 300 MW on the condition more projects meet green-friendly efficiency and renewable energy standards. Such efforts have attracted investments from companies like Microsoft and Google.
Still, Singapore is too small for wide-scale green power generation, thus there remain a lot of limitations on the market, said DC Byte’s Murphy.
Resource strains
While the boom in data centers has helped lift Malaysia’s economy, it’s also created concerns about energy and water requirements.
Kenanga Investment Bank Research estimates that potential electricity demand from data centers in Malaysia will hit a total maximum demand of 5 GW by 2035. The current installed electrical capacity for all of Malaysia is about 27 GW, according to Malaysian electricity company Tenaga Nasional Berhad.
Local officials are increasingly concerned about the extent of this power usage, as quoted in a recent report from The Straits Times.
Johor Bahru city council mayor Mohd Noorazam Osman reportedly said data center investments should not compromise local resource needs, given the city’s challenges with its water and power supply.
Meanwhile, a Johor Investment, Trade, and Consumer Affairs Committee official told ST that the state government would implement more guidelines on green energy use for data centers in June.
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that he’s working to root out bureaucracy from within the company’s ranks as part of an effort to reset its culture.
Speaking at Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle, Jassy said the changes are necessary for the company to be able to innovate faster.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
A year ago, as part of a mandate requiring corporate employees to work in the office five days a week, Jassy set a goal to flatten organizations across Amazon. He called for the company to increase worker-to-manager ratios by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of this year.
Jassy also announced the creation of a “no bureaucracy email alias” so that employees can flag unnecessary processes or excessive rules within the company.
Amazon has received about 1,500 emails in the past year, and the company has changed about 455 processes based on that feedback, Jassy said.
The changes are linked to Jassy’s broad strategy to overhaul Amazon’s corporate culture and operate like the “world’s largest startup” as it looks to stay competitive.
Jassy, who took the helm from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, has been on a campaign to slash costs across the company in recent years. Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022, and axed some of its more unprofitable initiatives. Jassy has also urged employees to do more with less at the same time that the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence.
Transforming Amazon into a startup-like environment isn’t an easy task. The company operates sprawling businesses across retail, cloud computing, advertising, and other areas. It’s the U.S. second-largest private employer, with more than 1.5 million employees globally.
“You have to keep remembering your roots and how useful it is to be scrappy,” Jassy said.
The StubHub logo is seen at its headquarters in San Francisco.
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Online ticket platform StubHub is pricing its IPO at $23.50, CNBC’s Leslie Picker confirmed on Tuesday.
The pricing comes at the midpoint of the expected range that the company gave last week. At $23.50, the pricing gives StubHub a valuation of $8.6 billion. StubHub will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “STUB.”
The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Eric Baker in 2000, and was acquired by eBay for $310 million seven years later. Baker reacquired StubHub in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo, which operates a ticket marketplace in Europe.
StubHub has been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its public debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump‘s “Liberation Day” tariffs roiled markets.
The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public.
The IPO market has bounced back in recent months after an extended dry spell due to high inflation and rising interest rates. Klarna made its debut on the NYSE last week after the online lender also delayed its IPO in April. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ Gemini, stablecoin issuer Circle, Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish and design software company Figma have all soared in their respective debuts.
At the top of the pricing range StubHub offered last week, the company would have been valued at $9.2 billion. StubHub had sought a $16.5 billion valuation before it began the IPO process, CNBC previously reported.
StubHub said in its updated prospectus that first-quarter revenue increased 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Operating income came in at $26.8 million for the period.
The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
In this photo illustration, the logo of TikTok is displayed on a smartphone screen on April 5, 2025 in Shanghai, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Tuesday extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business, which will be owned by an investor consortium that includes Oracle and Silver Lake, CNBC’s David Faber reported.
It’s the fourth time Trump has extended the deadline. The extension, as described in an executive order, precludes the Department of Justice from enforcing a national security law that would effectively ban TikTok in the U.S. until Dec. 16.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed on Monday that a “framework deal” had been reached involving TikTok. Under the national security law, which would have come into effect on Wednesday, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for providing services to TikTok’s U.S. operations if a deal was not reached.
Under the framework deal, about 80% of TikTok’s U.S. business would be owned by an investor consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported. As part of the arrangement, existing U.S. users would need to shift to a new app, according to report.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected on Friday to discuss the terms of the TikTok-related deal that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed on Monday.
The deal, which is expected to close in the next 30 to 45 days, includes new investors, existing ByteDance investors and will result in Oracle maintaining its cloud computing agreement with TikTok, CNBC’s David Faber reported earlier on Tuesday.
Bessent said Tuesday during CNBC’s Squawk Box that Trump was willing to let TikTok “go dark,” which spurred China to agree to a deal. The Treasury Secretary said that the deal’s commercial terms had already been finalized “in essence” since March or April, but China put the deal on hold following Trump’s tough tariffs and trade policies.
“We were able to reach a series of agreements, mostly for things we will not be doing in the future that have no effect on our national security,” Bessent said Tuesday.
A senior White House official said in a statement that, “Any details of the TikTok framework are pure speculation unless they are announced by this administration.”
TikTok did not reply to a request for comment.
WATCH: Trump’s willingness to let TikTok go dark motivated China to make deal.
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