KUALA LUMPUR: Oracle plans to invest more than US$6.5 billion to set up its first public cloud region in Malaysia, the company said on Wednesday, the latest major investment by a global tech firm into the Southeast Asian country.
Technology giants including Microsoft, Nvidia , Alphabet unit Google and China's ByteDance have announced billions of dollars worth of digital investments into Malaysia since last year, mostly in cloud services and data centres, powering an infrastructure boom driven by growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI).
A cloud region is the physical, geographic location where a company's public cloud facilities are located. Oracle's venture is set to be one of the largest single tech investments so far, outpacing the US$6.2 billion planned spending by Amazon's cloud unit AWS announced last year.
The planned public cloud region will help organisations in Malaysia modernise their applications, migrate their workload to the cloud, and innovate with data, analytics and AI, the U.S. firm said in a statement.
It would also allow the firm's Malaysian customers which include government agencies, financial institutions, and airline and hospitality companies, to use cloud services based in the country, rather than those based externally, said Oracle's Executive Vice President for Japan and Asia Pacific Garrett Ilg.
"Those customers look to Oracle to support their innovation... to move into standardised processes to be faster, to be more controlled and be more cost-effective," Ilg told Reuters in an interview.
The cloud region in Malaysia would be Oracle's third in Southeast Asia, after its two existing facilities in Singapore. It currently has 50 public cloud regions across 24 countries, according to its website.
Oracle last month raised its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast and said it expects to cross US$100 billion in revenue in fiscal 2029, indicating rising demand for its cloud services.
The company also wants to continue its expansion across Asia, with more data centres and infrastructure projects planned "from Japan all the way down to New Zealand... all the way to India," Ilg said.
Chris Chelliah, Oracle's senior vice president for technology and customer strategy in Japan and Asia Pacific, said Malaysia provided further growth potential and market opportunities for the company as part of a broader AI and data centre development push in Southeast Asia.
In the past year, Microsoft has announced cloud services investments worth US$1.7 billion in Indonesia, while Amazon has announced plans to invest US$9 billion in Singapore and $5 billion in Thailand.
Google on Tuesday broke ground on a US$2 billion data centre in Malaysia, part of investments that it said would contribute more than US$3 billion to the country's economy by 2030.