KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 8 — Nvidia is confident that South-east Asia will be a major tech hub in the region, with Malaysia in particular having a focus on both data centres and cloud computing. This is what the president of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang Jen-hsun, said at a media round table during his visit to Kuala Lumpur.
He is in town to meet up with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, as well as the captains of industry in Malaysia.
The 60-year-old Taiwanese American, donning his trademark black leather jacket, was named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time Magazine this year.
Reuters reported that he is also in town to announce a collaboration with YTL for new data centres, but he was quick to avoid commenting directly on that matter during the round table.
“YTL is an extraordinary company, (Malaysia) is an important hub for SEA (South-east Asia) computing infrastructure, which requires access to land, facilities and power, and YTL could play a great role in that. It would be a privilege for us to partner with YTL in any way,” he said during the event.
YTL tied up with Nvidia to offer GeForce Now earlier this year.
He also commented that the company is not shrinking its focus on consumer products, but mainly repartitioning its focus. This repartitioning is part of the company’s focus on Artificial Intelligence, which he also stresses is a big game changer for countries around the world.
Huang said later that generative AI is the most substantial thing that is happening in the field of AI “as it now allows people who can’t program to create programmes thanks to AI.”
During his visit to Malaysia, Huang will also meet data centre and infrastructure partners, which fuels the rumour that he is in town to announce a new data centre collaboration. He also commented that AI data centres can be a new manufacturing sector for Malaysia.
“Traditional data centres are designed to hold data, but the new AI data centres are essentially AI factories, where raw data will be refined and transformed to valuable data. Malaysia is a very strong manufacturing nation, and I believe your country has a unique advantage to potentially become an excellent data centre technology hub for Nvidia in the South-east Asia region,” Huang commented.
When asked later, he said that this is the perfect time for Malaysians to enter the AI field as Generative AI needs the manpower and expertise to grow, and Malaysians can take advantage to fill in the gaps. NVIDIA is already working with over 80 startup companies in Malaysia alone, working on topics such as health and AI.
With over 50 offices worldwide, Nvidia maintains a significant Asian presence with offices in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan. — SoyaCincau
