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Malaysia isn't that cheap for SEA btw. Thailand and Indonesia are probably cheaper.
They've got a wildly unique system of rotating kings if you've never looked into it. Also this could be like a 50 episode series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1Malaysia_Development_Berhad...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
It's just a matter of investment. If anything, the stable power demands from datacenters make business case for new builds stronger.
Also, it's not like these datacenters are serving western customers. These datacenters are far MORE costly than those in the EU/US because of the higher cooling costs, and also the latency is more than 200ms to the EU and US making them not suitable for real time use cases.
This story is nothing but a contrived whingefest, like much of the media these days.
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
Singapore, unlike Japan, is very attractive from a geopolitical standpoint as it is one of the few places that's friendly to both the West and to China, making it uniquely suited to doing business with both.
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
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.
Colo costs are 2x to 5x that of the US, depending on your power density requirements.
Absolutely no one is deploying racks to SEA to save money. They are only doing it only to reduce latency to SEA customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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…
Singapore holds the headquarters of a lot of SEA megacorporations, as well as regional HQs of big tech in both USA/China.
These chips are bought from these HQs and redistributed to the rest of the world (Singapore is a major shipping hub). India imports chips through their HQs in Singapore, so does Australia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, America, etc.
Maybe you could make the case that shady companies are exporting to China, but I am fairly skeptical as there are already American officials in Singapore collaborating to investigating this issue
So you get construction ...
But staffing after that, most big data-centers really focus on having as little staffing as possible. They're big, but I don't think they are big employers. I used to visit some BIG data centers that were largely unmanned.
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 used to be the obvious location for MNC offices in APAC. Especially since Hong Kong's return to China, Singapore has benefited and see an increase in head offices and employment.
However, over the last couple of decades surrounding countries have improved significantly. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand to name a few. Layer on top the ever increasing cost of living in Singapore and the latest trend is MNCs moving their offices outside of Singapore.
The benefit is a lower cost of operation including office rent and employee wages and it will be interesting to see how the trend continues. Not sure if that will help the process of locating datacenters in those countries as well, I guess we'll see.
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 advantage is that it has ample sunshine and over the past few years, the government has introduced various incentives for promoting residential and commercial solar energy investments
One can learn more about it from their renewal energy roadmap website https://www.seda.gov.my/reportal/