Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
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Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#2This article has so many problems that I don't know where to start.
> Tech companies exploiting resources in poorer countries while extracting data from their populations to get rich is akin to “digital colonialism.” She compared data extraction to silver mining in Bolivia, which enriched colonial Spain but left nothing behind for Latin America. “They are extracting data in the same way. Data doesn’t even leave (behind) taxes,” she said.
1) Data collection and data mining are very different from data centers, but good luck explaining that to the layman.
2) Malaysia's economic problems are largely due to dysfunctional government including racial preferences baked into the constitution, coupled with the resource curse, meaning exports of oil/LNG fund all sorts of wasteful spending and crowd out other businesses. "Digital colonialism" is the least of their worries.
3) Last but not least, 60% of SE Asia's data centers are in Singapore, which is wealthier than the Western countries that, per the article, are apparently exploiting it.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#3I guess the thesis is that Singapore is the primary business hub in SEA, but Singapore doesn't have a grid that can handle large scale data centers (especially with power hungry GPU demand). Logically Johor bordering Singapore is the next best option for data centers.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#4I guess the thesis is that Singapore is the primary business hub in SEA, but Singapore doesn't have a grid that can handle large scale data centers (especially with power hungry GPU demand). Logically Johor bordering Singapore is the next best option for data centers.
Singapore is also very land-constrained. Google's latest DCs there are multi-story, which is obviously going to be more expensive to build that your standard one-story warehouse.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#5I guess the thesis is that Singapore is the primary business hub in SEA, but Singapore doesn't have a grid that can handle large scale data centers (especially with power hungry GPU demand). Logically Johor bordering Singapore is the next best option for data centers.
Latency/Routing too. There are ISPs that would send you to Hong Kong or other places.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#6This article has so many problems that I don't know where to start. > Tech companies exploiting resources in poorer countries while extracting data from their populations to get rich is akin to “digital colonialism.” She compared data extraction to silver mining in Bolivia, which enriched colonial Spain but left nothing behind for Latin America. “They are extracting data in the same way. Data doesn’t even leave (behi…
Why do they have to go in that bent? Report the news, don’t inject prejudices into a story. All the things you mention are true but AP assumes few people know the ground truth and those that do they’d hope would just ignore it.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#7This article has so many problems that I don't know where to start. > Tech companies exploiting resources in poorer countries while extracting data from their populations to get rich is akin to “digital colonialism.” She compared data extraction to silver mining in Bolivia, which enriched colonial Spain but left nothing behind for Latin America. “They are extracting data in the same way. Data doesn’t even leave (behi…
2) let’s not forget cases like 1MDB
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#8I listened to the SemiAnalysis folks on the Lex Fridman podcast: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI
They claimed that the fact that Singapore imports so many GPUs despite a moratorium on data centers was evidence of China smuggling GPUs. Of course it’s impossible to prove a negative, but it seems a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that Malaysia, on the other side of a river, has a growing data center industry.
The technical aspects of the podcast regarding DeepSeek, which I’m more familiar with, were accurate as far as I can tell.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#9I guess the thesis is that Singapore is the primary business hub in SEA, but Singapore doesn't have a grid that can handle large scale data centers (especially with power hungry GPU demand). Logically Johor bordering Singapore is the next best option for data centers.
Latency/Routing too. There are ISPs that would send you to Hong Kong or other places.
My understanding is that transit/peering in Southeast Asia is pretty awful in general, and that's why a lot of CDNs and service providers charge you extra for traffic exiting in that region. I'm not sure how much of that is a lack of investment in infrastructure and how much is unresolved corporate / geopolitical tensions - but either way, building more data centers isn't going to fix it.
Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
#10This is the “move the factories to third world countries so that we can have cleaner air and water while consuming endlessly, pretending the consumption doesn’t come with problems or that the third world countries are the problem” equivalent of data centers.