Company announcements, product releases and industry commentary.
The Malaysia Digital 2030 action plan sets 2030 targets of a 30 per cent digital economy contribution to GDP, 500,000 high-value digital jobs, RM4.5 billion in public sector savings and 95 per cent of services online.
Alibaba Cloud has launched a public cloud region in Johor with two new data centres, taking its Malaysian footprint to five facilities and adding agentic AI services later in 2026.
Malaysia approved RM92.8 billion in investments in the first quarter of 2026, expected to create 50,226 jobs, with data centres and cloud computing alone accounting for RM34.6 billion across 33 projects.
Johor is creating a data centre framework to guide long-term planning and continuous improvement, with state investment chairman Lee Ting Han saying the state was the first in Malaysia to introduce its own guidelines.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim confirmed in parliament on 24 February 2026 that approvals for data centres unrelated to high technology and AI have been stopped, confirming an informal moratorium in place since mid-2024.
Microsoft has unveiled Southeast Asia 3, its second cloud region in Malaysia, to be developed in Johor Bahru as part of a US$2.2 billion investment that also covers land bought from EcoWorld and Crescendo Corp.
YTL Power and Nvidia have brought an AI data centre online at the 600MW YTL Green Data Centre Park in Kulai, Johor, running liquid-cooled NVL72 Grace Blackwell GPUs alongside Malaysia's own ILMU model.
Malaysia is expected to publish its National Sustainable Data Centre Framework in October 2025, setting a dedicated water tariff of RM5.50 per cubic metre and a possible renewable target for new data centres by 2030.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission is drawing up more plans for the second phase of JENDELA, the national digital network plan, as it pushes to extend high-speed internet coverage in rural areas.
