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Global tech companies should expect to pay a premium for access to energy and water to serve data centres in Malaysia, the country’s environment minister has said, as booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure puts pressure on resources.
Malaysia has emerged as a global hotspot for data centres, the storage facilities that enable fast-growing technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and cryptocurrency mining.
The country has attracted more than $16bn in investment commitments over the past year from Amazon, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance, most of it for data centre development in the southern state of Johor, which borders Singapore.
But data centres require huge amounts of energy and water to prevent them overheating, which has raised concerns among…
