Investment in the construction of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers is rapidly being carried out by countries that have aspirations to become a superpower in this nascent technology. Malaysia is among those that have received positive feedback with several AI data centers being built in Johor over the past two years. In a recent study conducted by Oxford University, this places Malaysia in a small group of countries in the world that have AI data centers.
In total, 32 countries in the world have AI data centers or equivalent to 16% of the total number of countries on earth. However, the same study found that 90% of the world's data centers are held by companies from the United States and China. This is not surprising because only these two countries have the technological capabilities to produce domestic AI hardware.
Microsoft, AWS and Google are the three main companies from the United States while Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent are from China. It is estimated that between 85-90% of these data centers use NVIDIA chips based in the United States. The world's major AI data centers are still concentrated in the United States, China and Europe.
Africa and South America are almost non-existent. This forces researchers in both countries to use overseas AI cloud services, which increases operating costs and raises questions about the security of stored data.
Among the issues raised is that Chinese companies offering cloud services in Malaysia are subject not only to Malaysian law but also to Chinese law, which gives authorities access to data stored overseas. This is one of the reasons why TikTok data from US users was moved to Oracle's browser a few years ago.