Malaysia has stepped up the AI race by launching a strategic AI infrastructure project to create a self-reliant ecosystem, backed by Chinese technology.
Malaysia Announces Adoption Of China's Chips & DeepSeek LLM Models, Claiming To Be Self-Reliant With The Technology
AI has expanded from Big Tech to now governments moving into the AI hype, and as Jensen said in his Computex keynote, the world is moving towards building AI infrastructure, which will receive a similar significance to power infrastructure. Similarly, according to a report by MCIGroup, it is claimed that the Malaysian government has taken the initiative to "localize" AI developments by hosting servers domestically in the region to ensure data integrity and the country's leading position in the technological world.
The special thing about this project is that the data will be stored in Malaysia, it will be managed by Malaysians, and it will be used by Malaysians as well, so this is how we can actually safeguard our AI sovereignty.
- Malaysia
Now, the interesting part of this initiative is that Malaysia will reportedly become the first nation to employ Huawei's AI chips for its project, and while the government hasn't explicitly stated this, it did say that the country will be the first outside of China to use chips and servers, along with DeepSeek LLMs from China, indirectly indicating that the nation will use Huawei's Ascend accelerators. This potentially means that Malaysia is violating the US export controls, which clearly state that any entity found using Huawei's chips will be penalized, so it is interesting to see how the US administration reacts to it.
Malaysia has been known to play the "dual-ball" game since the country has previously been accused of supplying NVIDIA's AI chips to China by leveraging US trade loopholes. It was claimed that individual organizations in the country were exporting AI chips and servers to China, and considering that there are no restrictions on Malaysia for now, they weren't violating anything, until the US discovered the trade loophole. And, now that the nation is using Huawei's chips, they could potentially face more scrutiny by the Trump administration.
The use of Huawei's chips outside of China clearly indicates that NVIDIA is facing formidable competition in China and that Huawei could potentially expand its influence beyond its own nation. Given that the company's rack-scale solutions, such as the CloudMatrix 300, are said to rival NVIDIA's Blackwell counterparts, Huawei isn't far away from levelling the competition.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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