By Rozanna Latiff and Fanny Potkin
KUALA LUMPUR -Nvidia is in superior talks with Malaysian conglomerate YTL on a knowledge centre deal, three sources acquainted with the matter stated, because the U.S chip large appears to be like for extra enterprise from Southeast Asia.
The potential tie-up would come with collaborating on cloud infrastructure, and is more likely to be anchored at YTL’s knowledge centre complicated within the southern Malaysian state of Johor, bordering Singapore, one of many folks stated.
The partnership would provide companies in Southeast Asia entry to Nvidia’s AI chips through cloud computing, a second individual briefed on the matter stated.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was visiting Malaysia on Friday, declined to remark straight on a possible deal.
“YTL is a rare firm, (Malaysia) is a crucial hub for SEA (Southeast Asia) computing infrastructure, which requires entry to land, services and energy, and YTL might play an amazing function in that,” he advised Reuters at a information convention. “It might be a privilege for us to accomplice with YTL in any means.”
YTL, whose telecoms division agreed to a cloud gaming partnership with Nvidia this 12 months, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Southeast Asia has turn out to be more and more vital for Nvidia as a “rising expertise hub,” with Huang telling reporters he was contemplating synthetic intelligence infrastructure tasks in Singapore or Malaysia. He stated this week the corporate would “doubtlessly announce some massive investments” in Singapore.
About $2.7 billion of the corporate’s revenues, or 15%, within the quarter that led to October got here from Singapore, a 401% leap from the identical interval final 12 months. Singapore hosts most of the Asian headquarters of U.S and Chinese language expertise giants, and greater than 1,100 AI startups.
The CEO advised reporters on Friday that Nvidia was working with 80 startups in Malaysia.
(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff in Kuala Lumpur, Fanny Potkin and Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore, and Max Cherney in San FranciscoEditing by Shri Navaratnam and Gerry Doyle)
