U.S.-based software giant Oracle has planned to invest more than 6.5 billion dollars to open a public cloud region in Malaysia.

This is to meet the rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence and cloud services in the country.

The planned Malaysia expansion would extend Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in the Asia-Pacific region to 12 public cloud regions, Oracle said in a statement on Wednesday.

Oracle said the Malaysia cloud region would include 150+ infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS) services, help boost the country’s digital economy, and drive AI-fuelled innovation.

“Rapidly growing demand for AI services prompts calls for more data centres that store large amounts of data and computational power to train and deploy AI models,’’ said Franco Chiam.

Mr Chiam is the vice president of cloud, data centre, and future digital infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region at the market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

The tech major said that organisations across the region would be able to accelerate AI innovation using OCI’s high performance and built-in security, powerful data, and distributed cloud capabilities.

According to Oracle, the planned public cloud region would help organisations in Malaysia modernise their applications, migrate all types of workloads to the cloud, and innovate with data, analytics, and AI.

In the region, customers can access OCI generative AI agents with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities and accelerated computing and generative AI services.

The service helps keep sovereign AI models within country borders, and the OCI Supercluster is the largest AI supercomputer in the cloud.

The company added that several NVIDIA AI infrastructure services will be available to customers, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

Garrett Ilg, Executive vice-president and general manager for Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle, said.

“Malaysia offers unique growth opportunities for organisations looking to accelerate their expansion with the latest digital technologies,” said Ilg. “Our multi-billion-dollar investment affirms our commitment to Malaysia as a regional gateway for cloud infrastructure as well as a comprehensive suite of SaaS applications deployed within Malaysia.’’ 

(dpa/NAN)