Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, said on Saturday that one of the world’s largest investors had told him in a video conference the previous week that he had chosen Kuching, in Sarawak, and locations in Peninsular Malaysia for an investment worth 50 billion dollars. Asked in which sectors, he answered: AI, new technology and data centres. Bloomberg has since reported that the investor is Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank Group. SoftBank has issued no statement and did not respond to requests for comment.
No timeline, funding structure, partner list or job count has been made public, and nothing binding has been announced. Earlier in October, SoftBank signed a non-binding framework agreement with Grab and Petroleum Sarawak Berhad to explore AI and digital infrastructure in Sarawak, which is the only documented step so far on the Sarawak side of the plan.
The context makes the direction plausible even if the number is unverified. The Malaysian Investment Development Authority has recorded 385.7 billion ringgit, about 94 billion dollars, of data centre related investment from 2021 through the first half of 2026, and Malaysia has set itself the target of becoming an AI nation by 2030 under a national AI action plan launched this year. Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have each announced multi-billion dollar Malaysian cloud and data centre programmes in recent years.
For now the 50 billion dollars is a prime minister’s account of a private call, not a capital commitment. What would turn it into one is a SoftBank announcement with sites, capacity, power arrangements and a spending schedule, none of which exists yet.