I'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.
I don’t think the rising Islamist tendencies would be any different if Umno was still running things - from my perspective most of these trends slowed down under recent government but they continue to trend in a worrying direction.
When I traveled to KL in 2019 I was impressed with how open and tolerant it was. My wife and I were asked no questions upon entry. Our passports were stamped and we were told "Welcome to Malaysia". We went during Eid, and were very comfortable despite being western atheists.
Open & tolerant? As a gay man you just made me laugh & cry. Hell, even fairly recently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rkx271xe6o a kiss between 2 men on stage got the band banned from the country.
Now, before you completely disregard the point I'm making; yes, they did ignore the laws/warnings they were given but your point is that Malaysia is tolerant and my point is that Malaysia is not tolerant at all.
We should call out intolerance when we see it; saying homophobia is a part of their "culture" is not good enough.
Ignoring an explicit law and then getting punished (and not even all that badly) is not at all germane to the subject, which is insecurity about rules that may start existing soon or are undocumented.
If you go to a muslim country and make out with another dude you're making a statement, which is fine. You know what the consequences will be before you do it. Your described scenario is no different from saying using white phosphorus on civilians is bad on stage in the US, which will also land you in incredible trouble.
It is not a full on dictatorship. Religions other than Islam are definitely allowed. I am Malaysian and literally grew up in a Christian missionary school.
The Parent is a Chinese-Malay and they do have grievances but his answer is probably biased. Malaysia is far from perfect but it is not Afghanistan. It is one of the best Muslim countries.
I wonder if those building data centers (I don't know about those building in Malaysia) see authoritarianism as a downside; many of them support such things.
Also, I'm surprised that people describe these events as particular occurances. It's a pattern followed all over the world now, including in the US. Who stands up now for freedom, democracy, and the necessary component of those things, toleration?
"The press is still frequently suppressed" and "forced all ISPs to route traffic through their DNS instead of allowing users to freely use Google or Cloudflare DNS"
how can international investor investing in data center where their data is supressed and censor??
Sounds 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.
Back when BN ruled, the government blocked Medium (which was reporting the 1MDB case), proposed "fake news" laws to silence people on social media. Govt parties owned majority share in all newspapers. They erased images from newspapers like party flags or KLCC.
After Anwar's party took over, one of the first things they did was remove the ban on Medium and the "fake news" laws. They did cut funding to newspapers (which probably a revenge policy). But we're making lots of progress in this space.
That such a ridiculous idea even being proposed is already a huge indication of authoritarianism, not to mention that MCMC could resurrect the idea at any time.
Are they unproductive? How many people are saying that UK and Europe shouldn't build data centers? Is irrationality not to be called out, simply because it's hurts some pre-existing notions of societal, civilisation, or perhaps racial superiority?
This is a very black and white thinking. Autocracy and democracy lies on a spectrum. Just because China doesn’t lie on the extreme end of Autocracy doesn’t mean it’s a democracy.
This is an ignorant statement to make. Most of East & Southeast Asia aren't religious extremists. Malaysia and Indonesia are exceptions rather than the rule. It's clear you're making statements about a large swarth of the region you have no clue about.
Malaysia has cheaper energy and a more open financial system than Indonesia and Thailand. Humans are a bit more expensive but that's not your biggest cost in a data center.
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.
What 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.
Passive heat rejection from the exterior of the datacenter was never going to be the way to go, even with a short, wide datacenter -- external evaporative cooling towers are the way to go. Liquid cooling for the core is already best practice for high power density racks, which gives you the ability to separate how you solve for cooling and how densely you can pack your gear.
Yeah cooling towers seems like the obvious choice, thanks for confirming! I’m sure there are some other more exciting designs that hook datacenters up to prosumer/mesh topology ambient-temp district heating/cooling loops - or there should be if there aren’t! - but what you described makes perfect sense.
Agreed 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.
There was once a proposal to run an extension cord from Australia to Singapore [1] since Australia could have plentiful and cheap solar power. However, the project collapsed after the capricious billionaire backers ditched it.
This is an insane idea, but would be epic if someone could figure it out. I don’t know much about how electricity grids work, but that seems fraught with so many challenges, not all of them technical.
I believe they have the technical challenges solved (at least on paper), and the Singaporean and Australian governments have both approved the project.
I'm a little surprised Singapore approved it, as it'll need to supply about 10% of Singapore's power in order to cover the cost of the cable, which seems like a big vulnerability to me.
Next question is, can they find enough buyers in Singapore for that much power.
At least there’s a fairly direct route from those countries to Singapore. Australia is pretty far, and there are some countries in between that could be a menace at any point in the future.
Pretty big challenge for Singapore to figure out a way to guarantee security long term.
There was a disagreement between the co-founders. One wanted to use HVDC cable to transmit power, the other wanted to use electrolysis to produce Hydrogen, put that on ships, then burn it in Singapore to produce electricity.
To resolve the dispute, they both agreed to put the project into administration, then both made bids to take full control, with HVDC proponent Mike Cannon-Brooks (co-founder of Atlassian btw) eventually winning control.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Green hydrogen plan eventually makes a come back, as solar power from Northern Australia has a compellingly low LCOE.
Twiggy was also talking about producing hydrogen in Tasmania from largely unavailable hydropower, or so the argument goes. If I recall correctly then turn that in to green ammonia.
Many of those dams are full to excess, at least sometimes. And what Twiggy doesn’t waste turning falling water in to energy anaemic hydrogen gas, ammonia is handy though, we can keep selling to Victoria for a profit, for the Tasmanian government to, what, waste on a footy stadium no one wants? No no, to waste storing the new Spirit of Scotland ferries.
(That video was uploaded a year ago but the episode the clip is from aired years before the new stadium was even proposed. And that’s not the only time that the TV show predicted a useless government project)
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.
On a related note, in the last 1 to 2 years there has already begun a shift in terms of multi-national investment in APAC outside of Singapore.
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.
While multinationals are investing elsewhere in SE Asia to serve SE Asian markets, I'm not seeing them move their HQs out of Singapore though, because they don't trust the Malaysian/Thai/Indonesian legal system and regulatory environment.
Cyberjaya (yes, you can cringe at the name) in Malaysia was built with the explicit goal of attracting them, but it's mostly call centers, not R&D. Even Malaysian success stories like Grab (the SE Asian Uber) prefer to operate out of Singapore.
The cost of living is rising everywhere, not just Singapore, so I’m not sure how relevant that factor is. Do you have evidence that MNCs are net moving out of Singapore?
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.
Malaysia's commercial electricity prices is about 0.13 USD/kWh, it's moderately cheap but not extremely cheap.
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
SE Asia has weaker solar than many similar regions, possibly because of all the rain. [0]
Most of the renewables come from hydro and biomass/biodiesel (lots of plantations too). Malaysia is still about 50% powered by natural gas, but it's gone down from 70% in 2000.
and 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.
LLM 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.
Cheap 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.
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 (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.
Why 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.
Outrage 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".
Worked 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.
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.
It depends on the taxes the government creates. For example, they could heavily tax electricity use or carbon output. Heck, they could tax data transit.
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.
Malaysia's GDP per capita is now equivalent to Poland's in 2015 or Portugal's in 2001. It's honestly kind of offensive to just lump them in like this is some failed state being exploited by building modern datacenters. Maybe they can manage their own affairs.
> 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.
Actually it does. Taking business opportunities to make money is the main way that poor countries become rich. If you block them off from that they don't find harmless ways to make money (any conceivable way for a poor country to make money can be painted as getting exploited if you're that way inclined), they just stay poor.
Malaysia 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.
I might also add that all of the big data center companies have sustainability goals that will push demand for cleaner energy, and therefore investment, in the country where they build.
I work for one of the top datacenter companies in the world and we run 8TWh on 96% renewable energy.
Do you have anything better to offer them? Because Malaysia can definitely not build these data centers without foreign investment..
As someone from a certain poor country, I can attest that your tone sounds very condescending. It makes it look like such countries lack the agency to choose for themselves and need a savior to swoop in and rescue them from their predicament.
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.
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
America imports GPUs from Singapore? I don't think Singapore is more than a drop in the bucket of America's GPU imports. America imports them from Taiwan.
This makes me skeptical of your other claims. Do you have evidence that most of the rest of the world for some reason routes their GPU imports through Singapore? That seems quite pointless.
> America imports GPUs from Singapore? I don't think Singapore is more than a drop in the bucket of America's GPU imports. America imports them from Taiwan.
Most stuff shipped from Taiwan to America goes via Singapore at least physically. It's the big shipping hub in the region.
Singapore placed a moratorium on new data center construction from 2019 to early 2022. It was not a "15-year moratorium" as Patel claimed, so he was pulling numbers out of his behind. Since 2022 Singapore has been expanding DC capacity quite aggressively as well: https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/business-insights/insights/singapo...
The fact that Patel didn't bother to verify something so easily Googleable speaks volumes about his credibility.
And here's a statement by NVIDIA:
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
Honestly many of the things Patel said in that podcast (not just about Singapore, but in general) belonged on r/ConfidentlyIncorrect.
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.
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
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.
I'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.
I don’t think the rising Islamist tendencies would be any different if Umno was still running things - from my perspective most of these trends slowed down under recent government but they continue to trend in a worrying direction.
When I traveled to KL in 2019 I was impressed with how open and tolerant it was. My wife and I were asked no questions upon entry. Our passports were stamped and we were told "Welcome to Malaysia". We went during Eid, and were very comfortable despite being western atheists.
Open & tolerant? As a gay man you just made me laugh & cry. Hell, even fairly recently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rkx271xe6o a kiss between 2 men on stage got the band banned from the country.
Now, before you completely disregard the point I'm making; yes, they did ignore the laws/warnings they were given but your point is that Malaysia is tolerant and my point is that Malaysia is not tolerant at all.
We should call out intolerance when we see it; saying homophobia is a part of their "culture" is not good enough.
Ignoring an explicit law and then getting punished (and not even all that badly) is not at all germane to the subject, which is insecurity about rules that may start existing soon or are undocumented.
If you go to a muslim country and make out with another dude you're making a statement, which is fine. You know what the consequences will be before you do it. Your described scenario is no different from saying using white phosphorus on civilians is bad on stage in the US, which will also land you in incredible trouble.
It is not a full on dictatorship. Religions other than Islam are definitely allowed. I am Malaysian and literally grew up in a Christian missionary school.
The Parent is a Chinese-Malay and they do have grievances but his answer is probably biased. Malaysia is far from perfect but it is not Afghanistan. It is one of the best Muslim countries.
I'd argue Germany is the better Muslim country.
I wonder if those building data centers (I don't know about those building in Malaysia) see authoritarianism as a downside; many of them support such things.
Also, I'm surprised that people describe these events as particular occurances. It's a pattern followed all over the world now, including in the US. Who stands up now for freedom, democracy, and the necessary component of those things, toleration?
"The press is still frequently suppressed" and "forced all ISPs to route traffic through their DNS instead of allowing users to freely use Google or Cloudflare DNS"
how can international investor investing in data center where their data is supressed and censor??
Ah, now you see the irony. That's the kind of irony we Malaysians have to live with.
Sounds 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.
And some of the unsuccessful ones.
It’s a bit hit and miss.
> the MCMC backed down after massive public outcry, but the government's authoritarian tendencies remain palpable.
That contradicts your thesis. They did listen to feedback from the people, that's democracy.
Back when BN ruled, the government blocked Medium (which was reporting the 1MDB case), proposed "fake news" laws to silence people on social media. Govt parties owned majority share in all newspapers. They erased images from newspapers like party flags or KLCC.
After Anwar's party took over, one of the first things they did was remove the ban on Medium and the "fake news" laws. They did cut funding to newspapers (which probably a revenge policy). But we're making lots of progress in this space.
That such a ridiculous idea even being proposed is already a huge indication of authoritarianism, not to mention that MCMC could resurrect the idea at any time.
[flagged]
In the future these kind of "whatabout" comments should be auto-flagged due to how unproductive they are.
Are they unproductive? How many people are saying that UK and Europe shouldn't build data centers? Is irrationality not to be called out, simply because it's hurts some pre-existing notions of societal, civilisation, or perhaps racial superiority?
"reading the comments gave me a headache..."
you, 45 days ago
This is simplistic. China famously ended the COVID lockdown after protests broke out. Would you call that a democracy?
I would. Autocracy would be arresting the protestors.
This is a very black and white thinking. Autocracy and democracy lies on a spectrum. Just because China doesn’t lie on the extreme end of Autocracy doesn’t mean it’s a democracy.
All of afro-Eurasia seems to be falling into religious intolerance and extremism, except for a few outposts.
This is an ignorant statement to make. Most of East & Southeast Asia aren't religious extremists. Malaysia and Indonesia are exceptions rather than the rule. It's clear you're making statements about a large swarth of the region you have no clue about.
I 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...
Malaysia has cheaper energy and a more open financial system than Indonesia and Thailand. Humans are a bit more expensive but that's not your biggest cost in a data center.
Malaysia is also (more or less, for business purposes) common law. Indonesia and Thailand are not.
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.
What 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.
Passive heat rejection from the exterior of the datacenter was never going to be the way to go, even with a short, wide datacenter -- external evaporative cooling towers are the way to go. Liquid cooling for the core is already best practice for high power density racks, which gives you the ability to separate how you solve for cooling and how densely you can pack your gear.
Yeah cooling towers seems like the obvious choice, thanks for confirming! I’m sure there are some other more exciting designs that hook datacenters up to prosumer/mesh topology ambient-temp district heating/cooling loops - or there should be if there aren’t! - but what you described makes perfect sense.
Volume 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.
Agreed 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.
There was once a proposal to run an extension cord from Australia to Singapore [1] since Australia could have plentiful and cheap solar power. However, the project collapsed after the capricious billionaire backers ditched it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
This is an insane idea, but would be epic if someone could figure it out. I don’t know much about how electricity grids work, but that seems fraught with so many challenges, not all of them technical.
I believe they have the technical challenges solved (at least on paper), and the Singaporean and Australian governments have both approved the project.
I'm a little surprised Singapore approved it, as it'll need to supply about 10% of Singapore's power in order to cover the cost of the cable, which seems like a big vulnerability to me.
Next question is, can they find enough buyers in Singapore for that much power.
Singapore's electricity is currently produced mostly from LNG piped in from Malaysia and Indonesia, so more diversification is welcome.
At least there’s a fairly direct route from those countries to Singapore. Australia is pretty far, and there are some countries in between that could be a menace at any point in the future.
Pretty big challenge for Singapore to figure out a way to guarantee security long term.
Why bother going all the way to Singapore when their neighbor (Java) has 100 million people?
Singapore rich. Indonesia poor.
The SunCable project is still moving forward.
There was a disagreement between the co-founders. One wanted to use HVDC cable to transmit power, the other wanted to use electrolysis to produce Hydrogen, put that on ships, then burn it in Singapore to produce electricity.
To resolve the dispute, they both agreed to put the project into administration, then both made bids to take full control, with HVDC proponent Mike Cannon-Brooks (co-founder of Atlassian btw) eventually winning control.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Green hydrogen plan eventually makes a come back, as solar power from Northern Australia has a compellingly low LCOE.
Twiggy was also talking about producing hydrogen in Tasmania from largely unavailable hydropower, or so the argument goes. If I recall correctly then turn that in to green ammonia.
Many of those dams are full to excess, at least sometimes. And what Twiggy doesn’t waste turning falling water in to energy anaemic hydrogen gas, ammonia is handy though, we can keep selling to Victoria for a profit, for the Tasmanian government to, what, waste on a footy stadium no one wants? No no, to waste storing the new Spirit of Scotland ferries.
Cynical bugger.
> for the Tasmanian government to, what, waste on a footy stadium no one wants?
It’s a Utopia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3XUn-EsThcE
(That video was uploaded a year ago but the episode the clip is from aired years before the new stadium was even proposed. And that’s not the only time that the TV show predicted a useless government project)
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.
Lots of dominant telcos in their country (less competition).
Massive place requiring a lot of capital expensive submarine cables.
On a related note, in the last 1 to 2 years there has already begun a shift in terms of multi-national investment in APAC outside of Singapore.
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.
While multinationals are investing elsewhere in SE Asia to serve SE Asian markets, I'm not seeing them move their HQs out of Singapore though, because they don't trust the Malaysian/Thai/Indonesian legal system and regulatory environment.
Cyberjaya (yes, you can cringe at the name) in Malaysia was built with the explicit goal of attracting them, but it's mostly call centers, not R&D. Even Malaysian success stories like Grab (the SE Asian Uber) prefer to operate out of Singapore.
Being able to trust the govt is a pretty important factor for businesses.
https://www.thevibes.com/articles/world/101600/singapore-los...
Some are moving HQ, some are just downsizing HQ and expanding offices in Malaysia or Thailand.
I agree it’s not a wholesale move out, but the trend is noticeable.
The cost of living is rising everywhere, not just Singapore, so I’m not sure how relevant that factor is. Do you have evidence that MNCs are net moving out of Singapore?
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.
Malaysia's commercial electricity prices is about 0.13 USD/kWh, it's moderately cheap but not extremely cheap.
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/
SE Asia has weaker solar than many similar regions, possibly because of all the rain. [0]
Most of the renewables come from hydro and biomass/biodiesel (lots of plantations too). Malaysia is still about 50% powered by natural gas, but it's gone down from 70% in 2000.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
its hard to serve customers in Asia from a DC in Iceland
and 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.
Does 50-100ms latency matters when LLM takes few seconds to minutes to produce answer?
This is stating the obvious, but LLM is not the only use case for a data centre.
Of 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.
LLM 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.
It's hot and humid, which means no free cooling and no evaporative cooling. It's all refrigerative, which is expensive.
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.
There are plenty of cold mountains almost everywhere, if that's really decisive.
"I can't see how they can compete with Iceland" Yeah but that's the problem its in iceland
You want to make data center close as possible to your customer
Cheap 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.
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 (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.
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.
Why 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.
Because "data centers are evil" is trending with the masses.
Outrage 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".
We need to organise a task force to rescue Singapore from digital colonialism. Why isn't the UN doing anything???
2) let’s not forget cases like 1MDB
If 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.
Worked 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.
Malaysia has always been doing the grunt work of the giants.
See also how does Geely control Proton.
You know Huei?
How 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.
Taxes
Does a data center bring in a lot of taxes?
It depends on the taxes the government creates. For example, they could heavily tax electricity use or carbon output. Heck, they could tax data transit.
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.
Malaysia's GDP per capita is now equivalent to Poland's in 2015 or Portugal's in 2001. It's honestly kind of offensive to just lump them in like this is some failed state being exploited by building modern datacenters. Maybe they can manage their own affairs.
> 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.
Actually it does. Taking business opportunities to make money is the main way that poor countries become rich. If you block them off from that they don't find harmless ways to make money (any conceivable way for a poor country to make money can be painted as getting exploited if you're that way inclined), they just stay poor.
Malaysia 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.
I might also add that all of the big data center companies have sustainability goals that will push demand for cleaner energy, and therefore investment, in the country where they build.
I work for one of the top datacenter companies in the world and we run 8TWh on 96% renewable energy.
Do you have anything better to offer them? Because Malaysia can definitely not build these data centers without foreign investment..
As someone from a certain poor country, I can attest that your tone sounds very condescending. It makes it look like such countries lack the agency to choose for themselves and need a savior to swoop in and rescue them from their predicament.
>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.
If you read the article, it is about Singapore, a first world country and Malaysia which is not. Western countries were not part of the conversation.
It's not serving Singapore though. If anything it would serve Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia. All countries with vastly more people than Singapore.
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.
The technical aspects of the podcast regarding DeepSeek, which I’m more familiar with, were accurate as far as I can tell.
> 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...
It is a pretty unfounded claim.
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
America imports GPUs from Singapore? I don't think Singapore is more than a drop in the bucket of America's GPU imports. America imports them from Taiwan.
This makes me skeptical of your other claims. Do you have evidence that most of the rest of the world for some reason routes their GPU imports through Singapore? That seems quite pointless.
> America imports GPUs from Singapore? I don't think Singapore is more than a drop in the bucket of America's GPU imports. America imports them from Taiwan.
Most stuff shipped from Taiwan to America goes via Singapore at least physically. It's the big shipping hub in the region.
There are plenty of other comments citing Nvidia statements, so I don't think I need to address this.
Certainly the tendency for people here to reach for the most conspiratorial theories is bizarre to me.
> despite a moratorium on data centers
Singapore placed a moratorium on new data center construction from 2019 to early 2022. It was not a "15-year moratorium" as Patel claimed, so he was pulling numbers out of his behind. Since 2022 Singapore has been expanding DC capacity quite aggressively as well: https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/business-insights/insights/singapo...
The fact that Patel didn't bother to verify something so easily Googleable speaks volumes about his credibility.
And here's a statement by NVIDIA:
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
Honestly many of the things Patel said in that podcast (not just about Singapore, but in general) belonged on r/ConfidentlyIncorrect.
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.
Here's a statement by NVIDIA:
"The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)
> 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.
Perhaps, but SEA is a very expensive place to run GPUs. High power costs, no free cooling.
Why wouldn't DeepSeek (or whoever) just export these to Northern China where power is cheap and the air is cold?
There are plenty of data centers in hot places all over the world.
Also, if you have been to Singapore, these are not people who are at all afraid of using air conditioning.
It's the 21C version of the European grab for Africa's natural resources.
[dead]