Amazon Web Services announces MYR 25.5 billion investment in Malaysia

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are deeply committed to supporting the Malaysian Government’s MyDIGITAL initiative, and its aspiration to transform Malaysia into a digitally-driven, high-income nation by 2030. To help deliver this vision, AWS is excited to announce plans to launch world-class cloud infrastructure with an AWS Region in Malaysia.

An AWS Region is comprised of multiple geographically separated Availability Zones, each of which contain a cluster of data centers that provide a high availability, reliable, and secure infrastructure and services. The new AWS Region in Malaysia will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, bringing the latest cloud technologies – from compute and storage, to artificial intelligence and machine learning, and more – closer to customers, while serving growing demand for digital services across Southeast Asia.

We have plans to invest at least MYR 25.5 billion (USD $6 billion) by 2037 in the new AWS Region in Malaysia. This will be our largest investment in Malaysia to date, unleashing further innovation and driving productivity for individuals, governments, and businesses alike.

While customers in Malaysia have leveraged AWS’s global infrastructure since our inception in 2006, the new AWS Region is a continuation of our long-term commitment to making investments that meet our customers’ growing need for world-class infrastructure. In 2016, we established our first AWS office in Kuala Lumpur, which supports our local workforce of data scientists, cloud engineers, solutions architects, account managers, and more that work hard to innovate of behalf of customers every day.

Since then, we have continued to support many Malaysian customers by launching local cloud infrastructure to meet the growing needs of customers. In 2017, we launched our first Amazon CloudFront edge location in Kuala Lumpur to give businesses and developers an easy and cost effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. In the same year, we announced the launch of an AWS Direct Connect location in Kuala Lumpur to help customers improve application performance by creating a dedicated network connection from their facilities and AWS. In 2020, we announced the availability of AWS Outposts to enable Malaysian customers to run AWS infrastructure and services on premises while connecting to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region.

The cloud is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime. There is not an organization in the world – from the smallest startup to the largest enterprises – that is not using the cloud to some degree.

Today, AWS customers include many of Malaysia’s leading companies such as Astro Malaysia Berhad, Axiata Group, Bank Islam Malaysia, CelcomDigi, Johor Corporation, PayNet, PETRONAS, and many more.

We are very excited about the vibrancy we have seen and the noticeable acceleration in the pace of customer adoption across all customer segments and industry verticals. For example, Malaysia-headquartered Axiata, a regional telecommunications and digital conglomerate, leverages AWS cloud computing and AI/ML on its digital transformation journey along the Telco to TechCo continuum, to meet the evolving needs of communities and businesses it serves.

Astro, Malaysia’s leading content and entertainment and content streaming company serving 5.6 million homes, has been collaborating with AWS since 2017 to enhance customers’ video experience, and continues to accelerate its digital transformation journey to enhance agility, resilience, achieve cost savings, and deliver new media and entertainment innovations and services to its customers with AWS.

Driving innovation on behalf of Malaysian citizens

There are millions of active customers leveraging AWS every month, including many that trust us with highly sensitive and secure workloads. In Malaysia, these customers include large public sector organizations like the Department of Statistics Malaysia, Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), Ministry of Education, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), the Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority, Pos Malaysia, Radio Televisyen Malaysia, and Smart Selangor, and Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB).

With the new AWS Region in Malaysia, we look forward to unlocking more opportunities for local public sector customers to work backwards from citizen needs and respond at pace to implement solutions that help to respond to challenges, modernize aging infrastructure, enhance security, and improve operational productivity. Our continued investment in national infrastructure in Malaysia will give public sector the ability to store content locally while serving citizens with even lower latency to improve the delivery of digital applications.

In March 2022, AWS signed a Cloud Framework Agreement (CFA) with MAMPU, together with local IT provider and AWS Partner, Radmik Solutions Sdn Bhd, to help accelerate cloud adoption in the public sector, and help agencies save costs, boost digital skills, and drive innovation. The CFA enables Malaysia’s government agencies and departments to access our services through a streamlined procurement model via MAMPU to drive innovation and digitize government services for citizens.

Working with MAMPU, we are honored to collaborate with customers such as the Department of Polytechnic and Community College Education (DPCCE), a department within Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education. to spearhead the expansion of a cloud platform for their Moodle-based online Learning Management System (LMS) across all their 36 polytechnics and 104 community colleges. By moving its LMS to AWS, DPCCE is able to rapidly scale up resources to enable over 150,000 active users to seamlessly access education services digitally, while benefitting from a fully managed system to run and scale all of their workloads, services, and applications securely, 24/7.

The Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority (FAMA), a marketing agency under the Malaysian Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry, is leveraging AWS to catalyze the evolution of Malaysia’s agro-food sector. AWS enables FAMA to move with greater speed and agility to meet the changing needs of the food supply chain, and ensure its products remain readily available and affordable for all Malaysians.

Supporting Malaysians to take their ideas global

Amazon’s “Day 1” mentality is a culture and operating model that puts customers at the center of everything we do. We’ve seen examples of Malaysian startups that exemplify this mentality by coming up with new solutions to tackle old problems.

As Malaysia’s first tech unicorn and Southeast Asia's largest integrated car e-commerce platform, CARSOME leverages AWS ML technology to digitalize the region’s used car industry and elevate the car buying and selling experience. AWS has enabled CARSOME to build reliable platforms providing end-to-end solutions, and rapidly scale its operations to meet fast-growing demand, serving over 14 million unique visitors monthly and over 20,000 active dealers in its network.

Many of these local startups launched on the AWS Activate program, which provides training, technical support, and AWS credits to support startup growth.

Malaysian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute 36.6% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Malaysia’s leading curry powder and spice brand Baba’s leverages AWS to reduce order processing and delivery time by 50%.

Many of these SMEs include AWS’s extensive network of AWS Partners in Malaysia that are part of the AWS Partner Network (APN), which includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world.

AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support to customers. AWS ISVs, SIs, and consulting partners help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers' cloud environments. Examples of Malaysian AWS Partners include Axrail, eCloudvalley, Exabytes, G-AsiaPacific, GHL, ISBS Technology, Kometsoft, Maxis, Radmik Solutions Sdn Bhd, Silverlake Axis, Tapway, Uberfusion, and Wavelet.

Working together to help address Malaysia’s skills gap

Achieving the government’s MyDIGITAL ambitions requires us to build a strong digital workforce with up-to-date digital skills to keep up with the pace of technological change.

By building a strong pipeline of cloud talent, Malaysia has the opportunity to seize immense economic benefits. According to new research commissioned by AWS and conducted by Gallup, workers in Malaysia who use advanced digital skills – including cloud architecture or software development – contribute an estimated MYR 170.2 billion to Malaysia’s annual GDP.

We are committed to collaborating with industry, government, education providers, and customers to address the skills gap on a number of fronts and are pleased to say since 2017, we have trained more than 700,000 people across ASEAN with cloud skills.

Our education programs help to build a diverse pipeline of entry-level talent into the cloud workforce. We continue to invest in upskilling local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Malaysia through programs like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS re/Start.

We also work closely with customers like PETRONAS by leveraging AWS Skills Guild, a comprehensive skills enablement program designed to build cloud skills across organizations. PETRONAS is offering self-paced digital training on cloud fundamentals to all 48,000 of its employees to equip them with cloud skills to make faster decisions, improve operational efficiency, and to deliver greater business value through advanced technologies.

Helping to drive a more sustainable future

We are committed to making a positive difference in Malaysia, whether it’s equipping citizens with the latest skills, or using technology to solve the world’s most pressing issues. As part of our commitment, we are focused on building a more sustainable future, which is important for our planet, our customers, and for the communities we live in.

As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target. In 2022, Amazon set a new corporate record for the most renewable energy announced by a single company in one year and remains the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy—a position it’s held since 2020.

We are also committed to helping our customers in Malaysia reduce their carbon footprint by moving workloads to the cloud. A report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, found that computing in the cloud is five times more energy efficient than on-premises data centers in the Asia Pacific Region and moving computing workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud can reduce organizations’ carbon footprint by more than 78%.

An AWS Region in Malaysia is important to the nation's sustainability efforts, as every workload that moves to the cloud will deliver positive environmental benefits compared to on-premises data centers.

Our commitment to Malaysia

Launching an AWS Region in Malaysia is part of our ongoing and deep commitment to supporting local growth and our vision for the nation to become a leader in the digital economy. We couldn’t be more excited to see how our customers and partners are already leveraging AWS today, and we will continue to support Malaysian customers as their needs evolve. We look forward to providing more updates about our AWS Region in Malaysia – stay tuned!