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Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
- decimalenough 2y agoThis 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.
- mc32 2y agoWhy 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.
- w00kie 2y agoBecause "data centers are evil" is trending with the masses.
- scarab92 2y agoOutrage is demand driven, rather than supply driven. Even if you solve all the worlds problemns, journalists would just stretch the truth further to find new things to be outraged about to keep the readers "happy".
- re-thc 2y ago2) let’s not forget cases like 1MDB
- ludicity 2y agoI'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.
- LAC-Tech 2y agoWe need to organise a task force to rescue Singapore from digital colonialism. Why isn't the UN doing anything???
- crowcroft 2y agoI 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.
- decimalenough 2y agoSingapore 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.
- dweekly 2y agoLong term, you'll want your datacenters to be roughly spherical to minimize cross-section path length latencies.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoVolume increases to the cube, where as surface area only increases to square. This results in large, perfectly spherical, data centre being more difficult to cool, especially when operating in a vacuum.
- dweekly 2y agoAgreed that surface cooling only for a spherical datacenter would be a bit silly; we're gonna need some exciting liquid plumbing to wend its way through, but that's already best practice for GPU cluster builds.
- szvsw 2y agoWhat about heat transfer? At least in a moderate, dry climate (whereas SP is hot/humid) there’s a natural benefit to having a high surface area to volume ratio, favoring wide/flat spaces, from the perspective of heat rejection. I’m not sure to what extent space cooling is actually a controlling factor in DC design, or what the typical strategies are (for instance I assume there are lots of new systems which make use of geothermal cooling). Anyways, just curious if you have any insight on that.
- janalsncm 2y agoI listened to the SemiAnalysis folks on the Lex Fridman podcast: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI 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.
- magicalhippo 2y ago> 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-Embargoed-Food-Re-export-EU-Russia.pdf https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus#/media/File:Europe-Belarus.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus#/media/File:Europe-Bel...
- scarab92 2y agoThere'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.
- janalsncm 2y ago> 2% of global data center capacity Let’s call the dollars per square foot the “cost density”. The claim you are repeating from the interview I mentioned is that SG data centers have an unusually high cost density. What could account for that? It might be that there is a very expensive item (a state of the art GPU for example) taking up that space. Another option, as I mentioned above, is that these GPUs are running inference in Malaysia which is right across the river.
- darth_avocado 2y agoThis 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.
- scarab92 2y agoNo 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.
- darth_avocado 2y ago> 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.
- scarab92 2y agoMalaysia has sufficient land and water to produce more power as needed. 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.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y agoIsn'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.
- slt2021 2y agoits hard to serve customers in Asia from a DC in Iceland
- porphyra 2y agoand the cold northern parts of Asia are mostly Russia and China. I guess maybe a Hokkaido data center would be cool, although over half of Hokkaido's energy still comes from fossil fuels. 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.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoDoes 50-100ms latency matters when LLM takes few seconds to minutes to produce answer?
- frontfor 2y agoThis is stating the obvious, but LLM is not the only use case for a data centre.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoOf course, but looking at next 10 years we will be seeing 10-100x growth specifically in LLM and AI, both can be located ~anywhere in the world.
- muzani 2y agoLLM latency has also gone down 10-100x in the last 5 years. Back then, you could only give it a few sentences, now it's like $10 for 10 novels worth of text.
- kristopolous 2y agoI was just on a call with a company in Japan yesterday talking about deploying datacenters in KL. News verified I guess... 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_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1Malaysia_Development_Berhad...
- duxup 2y agoHow much boosting do you get? 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.
- nsoonhui 2y agoI'm a Chinese Malaysian, and I feel the need to highlight the other side of the coin—the risks multinational corporations (MNCs) face when setting up data centers in Malaysia. Despite being elected on the promise of reform, the government's actual performance has been anything but. The press is still frequently suppressed; social media platforms are required to obtain a yearly license or risk being fined or shut down. There was even a time when the MCMC—the country’s communications regulatory body—forced all ISPs to route traffic through their DNS instead of allowing users to freely use Google or Cloudflare DNS, enabling government censorship. On that last point, the MCMC backed down after massive public outcry, but the government's authoritarian tendencies remain palpable. Speaking of authoritarianism, the current Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, has proudly likened himself to Southeast Asia’s version of Erdogan. And indeed, he seems to be increasingly authoritarian just like Erdogan, curbing free speech while advancing an Islamist agenda. Under his leadership, the country is becoming increasingly intolerant, particularly as the majority Malay Muslims frequently target minorities—sometimes on a near-weekly basis. You might be surprised to learn that socks printed with the word "Allah" resulted in the store owner being charged and penalized in court. Meanwhile, ongoing debates about banning convenience stores from selling liquor in Muslim-majority areas never seem to die down. Non-Muslims remain uncertain about when they might inadvertently face repercussions for perceived "mistakes"—whether intentional or not. Additionally, Anwar's staunch support for Hamas may not sit well with the current U.S. administration. Whether this will lead to investors pulling out, or somehow trigger the US sanction, remains to be seen.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoSounds what Malaysia needs is Big Co. & Friends to move in, data centres and all, and run the government from the shadows, much like they do in every successful democracy.
- charlie0 2y agoAnd some of the unsuccessful ones.
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- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- radenmuaz 2y agoMalaysia has always been doing the grunt work of the giants. See also how does Geely control Proton.
- cindylmcindy 2y agoYou know Huei?
- mmooss 2y agoIf Malaysia wanted to play hardball, they could wait until the data centers are built and running, and then raise electricity prices and taxes. If the government is authoritarian, they could be bribed. Remember the US government now says bribery is ok.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoIt's the 21C version of the European grab for Africa's natural resources.
- datacruncher01 2y agoWorked with Malaysian counterparts for a number of years. You have decent talent there but one of the key constraints I've heard from higherups is that the market doesn't have enough workers and a large multinational can saturate the skilled workers you need. So some companies are skipping to go to India instead.
- _lvbh 2y agoCheap labor and an existing base of semiconductor industries with lots of engineers definitely makes Malaysia attractive. Though from what I've heard, lots of factories moving in from China are having huge issues with infrastructure and construction quality. Also, the fact that so many companies have chosen Kulim rather than Penang makes transport extremely inconvenient.