Malaysia's goals backfired badly on that account. Most of the manufacturing was in Penang, dubbed the Silicon Valley of the East for a while. Some might rememb

Malaysia's goals backfired badly on that account. Most of the manufacturing was in Penang, dubbed the Silicon Valley of the East for a while. Some might remember most of their chips and RAM having "Made in Malaysia" on them through the 90/00's, all from one little area. But the country squandered the opportunity due to racial divides and the federal government's dislike of the Chinese-Malay majority on the island, a place that very much resembled Singapore's demographics and ironically tried to secede at the same time but was shot down due to the Malaysian government considering it vitally important unlike Singapore (who then went from the one of the poorest countries on Earth to the richest despite absolutely no natural resources), the years after weren't much better, they never really ever wanted it to succeed too much and consistently denied appropriate amounts of federal funding despite the population levels. It's one of the few states in the country where a leader who isn't ethnic-Malay is legally allowed to get the job. Many don't like this situation as Malay supremacy is written into the constitution and is still deeply engrained into the national psyche. An Indian or Chinese leader makes many uncomfortable. Fast forward a few decades and there's still a reasonable contingent of manufacturing around but advanced fabs have long left, somewhat surprisingly to more expensive shores like Taiwan, SK and China, nowadays some silicon is made elsewhere and shipped into Malaysia for assembly despite the vast amount of infrastructure, foreign skillsets and supply chains built up over 30 years. At one point long ago one third of all of the exports out of the country was cpus. Quite impressive for a SE Asian country with a large amount of natural resources. Sandisk and some other storage manufacturers are still around but there's the feeling the island never got to see it's full potential and was never capitalized on. The government tried to replicate this recently in a more "Malay friendly" province 20km outside of KL renamed as Cyberjaya (literally cybersuccess). It's widely mocked as a failure across the political spectrum to this day, it only ended up housing some DC's utilizing cheap coal fired power in a tropical climate and some international call centers despite huge amounts of government subsidies trying to lure in innovation.