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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

#11

Post by ludicity »

decimalenough wrote: post #2

This 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…

I'm Malaysian, and in tech (though I've left the country), and this is all accurate.

2 in particular is huge.

It's super weird seeing my country make headlines, but only in a way where I don't recognize the place they're talking about at all.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#12

Post by magicalhippo »

janalsncm wrote: post #8

I 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…

> They claimed that the fact that Singapore imports so many GPUs despite a moratorium on data centers was evidence of China smuggling GPUs.

Reminded me of the Belarusian shrim export suddenly soaring[1] after sanctions against Russian started.

For those who aren't too familiar with European geography, a look at the map[2] gives an indication as to why that's rather suspicious.

[1]: https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus#/media/File:Europe-Bel...

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#14

Post by scarab92 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #10

This 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.

No it isn't. That's just the journalist unprofessionally injecting their political ideology into what is supposed to be a factual article.

Malaysia has an opportunity simply because Singapore can't keep up. It doesn't have the land to waste on data centers, nor does it have the spare power generation capacity.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#15

Post by scarab92 »

duskwuff wrote: post #9
re-thc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm also curious as to why transit is so extortionately expensive in this region.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#16

Post by slt2021 »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #13

Isn't that part of the world usually has warmer climate? Unless the electricity there is somehow extremely cheap, I can't see how they can compete with Iceland, for example.

its hard to serve customers in Asia from a DC in Iceland

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#17

Post by scarab92 »

janalsncm wrote: post #8

I 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…

There's definitely something fishy going on.

Singapore only has about 2% of global data center capacity. It's floor space, power and transit costs are at least twice that of the US and EU making it an unattractive place to do model training.

Nonethless, it accounted for 28% of NVIDIAs datacenter GPU sales.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#18

Post by darth_avocado »

scarab92 wrote: post #14
darth_avocado wrote: post #10

This 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.

No it isn't. That's just the journalist unprofessionally injecting their political ideology into what is supposed to be a factual article. Malaysia has an opportunity simply because Singapore can't keep up. It doesn't have the land to waste on data centers, nor does it have the spare power generation capacity.

> Malaysia has an opportunity simply because Singapore can't keep up. It doesn't have the land to waste on data centers, nor does it have the spare power generation capacity.

Malasia doesn’t have the spare power either and neither does it have the capacity to keep the power clean, that’s what is being argued in the article. Poor countries will always take up a business opportunity to make money because they are poor. That doesn’t fix the problem that the business opportunity could do plenty of harm to the country in other ways. Just like Malaysia and other South Asian countries import more garbage than they can process from first world countries because that brings in money for them.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#19

Post by MangoCoffee »

darth_avocado wrote: post #10

This 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.

>move the factories to third world countries so that we can have cleaner air and water

You do know there are latency issues when servicing the Western countries from Asia, right?

make it make sense.

Re: Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy

#20

Post by dweekly »

decimalenough wrote: post #4
crowcroft wrote: post #3

I 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.

Long term, you'll want your datacenters to be roughly spherical to minimize cross-section path length latencies.
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