While in the latter half of the
2010s there was an effort to bring back essential functions of American
businesses such as manufacturing back to US soil, some companies have continued
expanding overseas, for example tech giants like Microsoft. Considering that
they also manage massive amounts of electronic data and provide cloud storage
services worldwide, it makes sense for Microsoft to set up shop at countries to
cover regional areas, usually in partnership with local telecom providers. This
is the arrangement that Microsoft Corporation has reached with the government
of Malaysia here in Southeast Asia, as laid out by their Prime Minister this
past Monday.
Inquirer.net reports that Malaysia is looking at a nice $1 billion
worth of investment in the course of the next five years from Microsoft, in
order to set up data centers in the country while partnering with the Malaysian
government and some of its homegrown tech and telecom companies. During the
launch of this “Bersama Malaysia” initiative on April 19, Malaysian Prime
Minister Muhyiddin Yassin described the establishment of a “data center
region,” where Microsoft’s data center as well as those of other international
tech brand names will be concentrated.
From the Microsoft corner, Executive
Vice President Jean-Philippe Courtois issued a statement intimating that their
upcoming data center will enable a “transformative” evolution on how the
federal government and private sector of Malaysia will operate. As Courtois
puts it, “The upcoming datacenter region will be a game-changer for Malaysia.”
And to help facilitate that transformation, part of Microsoft’s investment will
be in training Malaysians to gain digital skills, with their target objective
being the education of a million interested people in the country by 2023.
The investment that Malaysia is
getting out of this partnership is a breath of fresh air for the country that
saw its foreign direct investment percentage for 2020 shrink by 68%, being the
worst out of all nations in Southeast Asia. And it is not like Microsoft is the
only company establishing a physical presence there. Google and Amazon have
their own stakes in Bersama Malaysia, where they will team up with Telekom
Malaysia, the country’s state-owned telco, to construct data centers for
managing hyper-scale amounts of data and cloud storage for countries in the
region. It may take some time before the endeavor shows fruit, with its
five-year timeframe.
Image courtesy of Microsoft News
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