Amazon Web Services announced the launch of its AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region on Thursday, along with a pledge to invest an estimated US$6.2 billion (around MYR 29.2 billion) in Malaysia from now to 2038.
The new Malaysia region consists of three Availability Zones, which AWS says are located far enough from each other to support business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
“The new AWS Region in Malaysia enables organizations across Asia Pacific to unlock the full potential of the world’s most extensive and reliable cloud, helping customers deploy advanced applications with a broad set of AWS technologies like AI and ML,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS in a statement.
AWS added that in addition to serving Malaysia’s increasing appetite for cloud and AI, the new region will also add an estimated US$12.1 billion to the country GDP and support an average of more than 3,500 full-time equivalent jobs at external businesses annually through 2038.
“These jobs, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others within the country’s broader economy, will be part of the AWS supply chain in Malaysia,” AWS said.
AWS first announced plans for the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region in March 2023. At the time, it pledged to invest US$6 billion in Malaysia through to 2037.
Malaysia has become a hotbed of cloud and data centre investment from big-name hyperscalers. In May, Microsoft pledged to invest US$2.2 billion over the next four years in new cloud and AI infrastructure in the country, as part of a chain of similar investments across Southeast Asia. A few weeks later, Google announced plans to invest US$2 billion in Malaysia and develop its first data centre in the country, along with a Google Cloud hub.
The data-centre gold rush has raised concerns about energy consumption and sustainability. The Malaysian Ministry of Energy Transition and Water Transformation (Petra) and The Ministry of Investment, Trade, and Industry said earlier this month they will introduce initiatives to encourage data centre investors to meet sustainable development goals.
AWS says it is already ahead of the curve on the sustainability front, citing a report by Accenture (that AWS commissioned) which said AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, while workloads optimized on AWS can reduce the associated carbon footprint by up to 99%.
“With the new AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, customers will also benefit from AWS’s sustainability efforts across its infrastructure,” AWS said.
With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, AWS now has 108 Availability Zones across 34 geographic regions. Another 18 Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions are in the works for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Thailand. AWS recently said that the AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will go live in early 2025.
