South-east Asia emerges as global data centre hot spot as AI usage rises

SINGAPORE – The world’s largest expertise companies are flocking to South-east Asia to construct information centres at a time when demand for infrastructure and computing energy to allow synthetic intelligence (AI) is quickly rising.

The brand new investments are anticipated to contribute to the area’s economies by creating expert jobs in information centre building, engineering and upkeep, whereas additionally growing specialised expertise in AI, cyber safety, and information science and administration.

The investments can even enhance the area’s digital infrastructure, permitting small companies and huge establishments to retailer their information domestically, considerably decreasing downtime whereas rising information sovereignty.

With AI-supported improvements akin to searches on ChatGPT now requiring at the least 4 to 5 occasions extra processing capability in contrast with conventional web searches, information centre demand is anticipated to develop at round 20 per cent a yr for the following 5 to seven years, analysts at Maybank famous in an October report.

Knowledge centres are giant services constructed to accommodate servers, information storage methods and networking gear that assist higher web providers and telecommunications.

This, in flip, permits in style on-line actions akin to gaming, live-streaming and investing, in addition to extra superior applied sciences like cloud computing and AI.

Because of its decrease prices, energy availability and geopolitical neutrality, South-east Asia is rising as an excellent area for tech operators to ascertain a knowledge centre base, with the highest 5 international locations being Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Whereas Singapore is the popular vacation spot for internet hosting information centres attributable to superior infrastructure and a secure regulatory regime, the Republic had imposed a three-year halt on information centre building between 2019 and 2022 to evaluate its impression on the surroundings.

Malaysia seized the majority of latest information centre investments getting into the area throughout that interval, and now expects services with round one gigawatt (GW) of energy capability to come back on-line over the following two years.

That’s double the present information centre capability it presently has.

One other 3GW has additionally been introduced and, if accepted, shall be progressively rolled out within the subsequent three to 5 years, RHB Financial institution stated.

Compared, Singapore’s information centre capability presently stands at round 1.4GW.

Amongst these channelling capital into Malaysia are tech titans like Microsoft, which stated in Might that it’ll make investments US$2.2 billion (S$2.9 billion) over the following 4 years to construct cloud and AI infrastructure within the nation.

Amazon Net Companies (AWS) in August introduced plans to take a position an estimated US$6.2 billion to arrange a knowledge centre and cloud area in Malaysia.