FMT:
Singapore-based data centre firm to invest RM28bil in Malaysia
DayOne Data Centres aims to provide 1,200 direct jobs in Malaysia, and more than 5,000 across the supply chain
DayOne Data Centres said Malaysia is set to become its largest global operational footprint with its planned investment. (Freepik pic)
PETALING JAYA: A Singapore-based hyperscale data centre operator has announced a commitment to invest more than RM28 billion in Malaysia by the end of the year, strengthening the country’s position as a regional digital hub.
DayOne Data Centres said the investment will support the expansion of its operations, including infrastructure development, shared services, and talent programmes, with Malaysia set to become its largest global operational footprint.
In a statement today, DayOne said it aims to double its workforce and provide 1,200 direct jobs in Malaysia.
It said the expansion is expected to create more than 5,000 jobs across the supply chain, alongside over 200 high-value roles across finance, procurement, investment, and corporate functions at its service centre in Kuala Lumpur.
In Johor, the firm will establish a regional operations and training hub to train more than 1,000 data centre engineers to support artificial intelligence-ready infrastructure.
Deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi welcomed the initiative and stressed the importance of collaboration between government, industry and academia in developing both digital infrastructure and skilled talent.
“We do not just create jobs, we create opportunities. And more importantly, we build talent that can compete globally,” he said.
Malaysia has been at the heart of a regional data centre boom.
It was the fastest-growing data centre market in the Asia-Pacific region in 2024, and roughly 40% of all planned capacity in Southeast Asia is now slated for Malaysia, reported Bloomberg.
At least US$34 billion in data centre investments has poured into Malaysia over the past four years. Among others, Alphabet Inc’s Google committed US$2 billion, Microsoft Corp announced a US$2.2 billion investment, and Amazon.com Inc is spending US$6.2 billion.
The government aims for 81 data centres by 2035.
DayOne Data Centres said the investment will support the expansion of its operations, including infrastructure development, shared services, and talent programmes, with Malaysia set to become its largest global operational footprint.
In a statement today, DayOne said it aims to double its workforce and provide 1,200 direct jobs in Malaysia.
It said the expansion is expected to create more than 5,000 jobs across the supply chain, alongside over 200 high-value roles across finance, procurement, investment, and corporate functions at its service centre in Kuala Lumpur.
In Johor, the firm will establish a regional operations and training hub to train more than 1,000 data centre engineers to support artificial intelligence-ready infrastructure.
Deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi welcomed the initiative and stressed the importance of collaboration between government, industry and academia in developing both digital infrastructure and skilled talent.
“We do not just create jobs, we create opportunities. And more importantly, we build talent that can compete globally,” he said.
Malaysia has been at the heart of a regional data centre boom.
It was the fastest-growing data centre market in the Asia-Pacific region in 2024, and roughly 40% of all planned capacity in Southeast Asia is now slated for Malaysia, reported Bloomberg.
At least US$34 billion in data centre investments has poured into Malaysia over the past four years. Among others, Alphabet Inc’s Google committed US$2 billion, Microsoft Corp announced a US$2.2 billion investment, and Amazon.com Inc is spending US$6.2 billion.
The government aims for 81 data centres by 2035.
Is that a good thing? Sucking electricity and water and for a measly 1200 direct jobs while raising cost for the rest?
ReplyDeleteShall we all eat silicon?
Oh, Oracle is not the only one...the list is long.
ReplyDeleteQuestion is, or maybe are, if that many people are redundant for a profitable business to run, going forward, then perhaps there is no need for that many people then? Do wonder...of course, new type of work will be created, or won't we? Just too bad for those who cannot keep up.
https://x.com/i/status/2039038666287276158
Oracle axes 30K jobs in massive layoff - notifying fired employees with 6 a.m. email trib.al/eTTc93b
https://x.com/i/status/2039066982838833423
Your alarm goes off at 6 AM. There's an email from "Oracle Leadership." You've never gotten a message from that sender before. It says your job is gone, today is your last day, and severance details will arrive by DocuSign. By the time you finish reading, your company laptop is already locked.
This happened to up to 30,000 Oracle employees this morning. Oracle reported $17.2 billion in revenue last quarter, its best in 15 years. And it still fired nearly 1 in 5 of its people. The stock went up 6% today.
Oracle owes over $108 billion. The company signed a $156 billion deal to build AI data centers over five years, mostly for OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT). That requires buying roughly 3 million specialized computer chips. Two years ago, Oracle spent $6.9 billion a year on this kind of construction. This year it's $50 billion.
The 30,000 people who got that email are funding the gap. Investment bank TD Cowen estimates the layoffs will free up $8 to $10 billion in cash flow, money going straight into chips and construction. Oracle filed a $2.1 billion restructuring plan with regulators in March, and nearly $1 billion had already been spent before the emails went out.
Lenders are getting nervous. The cost to insure Oracle's debt against default has spiked to levels last seen during the 2009 financial crisis. Barclays downgraded Oracle's debt in November, warning the company is one step from "junk" status, the point where lenders consider you a serious default risk. Some banks have stopped lending to Oracle for these projects altogether.
The gamble gets worse. CNBC reported on March 9 that OpenAI, Oracle's biggest customer for all of this, is already looking at newer, faster chips from Nvidia. Oracle ordered the current generation and spent billions building out a massive Texas facility. OpenAI may not fully expand into it. The chips improve faster than the buildings go up.
Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, owns 41% of the company. In September 2025, Oracle's stock hit $346, and Ellison briefly became the richest person alive at $393 billion. Today, the stock sits around $146. His fortune has dropped to roughly $201 billion in six months.
Oracle is spending borrowed money to build data centers that could be outdated before they're finished, for a customer already shopping for newer equipment. 30,000 people woke up to a 6 AM email because that's what it costs to fund a $156 billion bet when your lenders are running out of patience.
https://x.com/i/status/2039155738514452481
> Oracle is worth $400 billion
> Its founder is the third richest man on the planet
> Oracle reported a 22% revenue gain this quarter
Still they fired 30,000 employees over email to fund AI Data centers. You don't hate billionaires enough.
Never work on AI at professional level...cannot relate...
Deletehttps://x.com/i/status/2039538965162889658
Some of them are starting to recognize their AI psychosis.
I was on a call last week where an Eng Director said they were lacking sleep for many days and had agents running tasks overnight. After a solid night of rest, they realized the agents had produced about a weeks worth of slop and they erased all of it.
https://x.com/i/status/2039080883270156557
DeleteThere is a lot more to the Oracle layoffs than what meets the eye.
Trump stood at the White House in January 2025 and said Stargate would create "100,000 American jobs almost immediately."
Larry Ellison was standing next to him.
This morning, Oracle -- not just a Stargate partner, but the primary builder and physical operator of every Stargate data center -- sent the first of 30,000 of its own workers a termination email at 6 a.m.
No manager was looped in. System access was cut on delivery. The email was signed "Oracle Leadership."
Here is the part worth sitting with:
The 100,000 jobs Trump announced are construction workers. Concrete. Steel. Cooling systems. Temporary site labor across Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan. Real jobs, yes, but they end when the buildings are done.
The 30,000 fired today are software engineers, cloud architects, SaaS operators, healthcare IT workers. The people who built the systems those data centers are being built to run. Permanent careers. Gone in a single email before sunrise.
Oracle is not struggling. It posted $6.13 billion in profit last quarter. Up 95% year-over-year.
It is cutting workers because it owes $248 billion in data center lease commitments that do not appear on its balance sheet. It is cutting workers because it committed to $50 billion in AI infrastructure spending this fiscal year alone. It is cutting workers because the $300 billion OpenAI contract it signed -- the one that made Ellison briefly the richest person on earth -- does not generate revenue until 2027.
Bloomberg reported three weeks ago, citing internal Oracle sources, that the cuts targeted "roles the company expects AI to make redundant."
The termination email said "broader organizational change."
Oracle told 30,000 employees: organizational change.
Oracle told Bloomberg: AI.
Oracle told investors: the plan is working.
Oracle told America: 100,000 jobs.
All four are technically true.
Oracle's stock was up 5% while the emails were still landing.
https://x.com/i/status/2039787310649098554
DeleteJUST IN - Iran launches a strike on Oracle's data center in Dubai, says IRGC.
My apology.
Deletehttps://x.com/i/status/2039812899074724035
Fake News Alert
https://x.com/i/status/2039844577142845651
Delete🦔 About half of the US data centers planned to open in 2026 are expected to be delayed or canceled, according to analysts at Sightline Climate. Of the 12 gigawatts of data center capacity announced for this year, only a third is actually under construction. The problem is not money or ambition but electrical components. Transformers, switchgear, and batteries make up less than 10% of data center construction costs but are impossible to build without. US manufacturing cannot meet demand so builders have been sourcing from China, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea. Transformer delivery times have stretched to as long as five years. US imports of high-power transformers from China jumped from fewer than 1,500 in all of 2022 to more than 8,000 in the first ten months of 2025 alone.
My Take
This is the physical reality underneath the AI infrastructure announcements and it deserves more attention than it gets. Hyperscalers have committed over $650 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year. The Atlantic piece I shared last week laid out how the supply chain for this buildout runs directly through the Middle East and China. This story is the electrical component version of the same problem. The US cannot build the data centers it has announced because it cannot manufacture the parts fast enough, and the parts it can get come primarily from China, the country it is simultaneously trying to decouple from through tariffs.
The numbers get more difficult the further out you look. For data centers planned to open in 2027, only 6.3 gigawatts are under construction against 21.5 gigawatts announced. For 2028 through 2032 the vast majority haven't broken ground. There is a growing gap between what has been promised to investors and what is physically being built, and that gap sits underneath valuations that assume the buildout happens on schedule.
Hedgie🤗
1. I am mindful that this is a social media, which can be true as presented, partially true to manipulate readers' emotion or completely made up. I share that it is a possible true situation.
Delete2. Either there is an excess of population to dignify work generation or there is redux to feudalism society. Or this is a cusp of golden age of humanity...where there is an outpouring of grace for goodwill towards all that is good, otherwise, the trajectory of technology development, humanity skew towards uber wealthy pursuit means most are not really needed. Does this point to uber tech control before an outburst of the havenot?
https://x.com/i/status/2040039120576405586
“Oracle laid me off.
But the law is trying to finish me.”
— A Man with a broken smile
👉
Arjun Mehta was the guy every engineering student wanted to be.
•Tech Lead at Oracle
•₹35 LPA package
•Stock options, onsite hopes, stable life
Everything was smooth… except his marriage.
His wife, Ritika, also in IT, hadn’t lived with him for months. No kids, no responsibilities — yet she slapped Arjun with:
•A false 498A dowry harassment case
•₹45,000 per month maintenance
•A ₹4 crore alimony demand
She earned well herself, but the court battle had turned into a power game.
Still, Arjun managed.
Taxes + rent + EMIs + 45k maintenance — he survived because Oracle paid well.
Then came the mail that changed everything.
Not from police.
Not from court.
Not from his lawyer.
From Oracle.
Subject line: Organizational Restructuring – Role Impacted
Like thousands globally, Arjun was just another name in the Oracle 2026 layoffs.
Pure business decision.
No performance problem.
Just numbers.
Just corporate restructuring.
Just bad timing.
He stared at the screen, numb.
A severance package.
A thank-you note.
A laptop surrender date.
The first thought wasn’t his career.
The first thought wasn’t his savings.
The first thought wasn’t even his family.
It was the court order.
“Maintenance shall be paid before the 10th of every month…”
Suddenly, the same ₹45,000 that was manageable with a 35 LPA job now became a death sentence.
Because Indian law is cruel to men in one specific way:
If you fail to pay maintenance —
you can be jailed.
No income?
No job?
No mercy.
He wasn’t afraid of losing his home.
He wasn’t afraid of losing his car.
He wasn’t afraid of starting over.
He was afraid of going to jail for not paying a woman who filed fake cases against him.
A criminal for being unemployed.
A debtor for being laid off.
And then her lawyer filed a petition:
“Non-payment of maintenance. Issue arrest warrant.”
Arjun’s fought hard:
•Showed severance letter
•Showed bank statements
•Showed job applications
•Showed zero-income status
But the judiciary doesn’t care.
The judge said mechanically:
“Maintenance is not optional.
Pay or face consequences.”
Arjun walked out of the courtroom feeling smaller than he ever felt in life.
A man who once wrote code for global servers
…was now begging the court to not send him to jail
…for failing to pay reverse dowry to a wife who left him and filed fake cases.
He smiled a broken smile:
“Oracle laid me off.
But the law is trying to finish me.”
This is the story of thousands of men —
their jobs may end because of economic layoffs, but their freedom ends because of laws that assume a man must pay, even when he cannot breathe.😢
Could not help seeing pattern epitomize by the likes of Yuval Noah Harari, most amplified in the last 5 years...
Deletehttps://www.ynharari.com/
Those kind of tweets comming up my feed most probably because of algorithm...regards.
https://x.com/i/status/2040199474031538363
Had drinks with 30 CTOs last night at an off-the-record gathering in Palo Alto
Every single one showed me the same internal PowerPoint slide
"2026 AI Headcount Targets: Path to 70% Cost Reduction"
The numbers will make you physically sick
Fintech CTO planning to cut 280-person engineering org down to 43 "AI orchestrators" by September. Same product roadmap. Same delivery expectations.
Healthcare CTO already eliminated his entire manual QA department. 67 people. Replaced with 3 senior engineers running autonomous testing agents that ship code directly to production.
SaaS CTO walked me through his "human depreciation timeline": 340 engineers today, 89 planned for 2027. Customer support going from 120 humans to 12 "escalation specialists" managing AI conversations.
The most chilling part: they're all using the exact same consulting deck from McKinsey called "The 30% Organization"
One CTO literally said "hiring humans for code is like hiring horses for transportation"
Another showed me Slack screenshots where his L7s are asking if they should train their replacements
The consensus was unanimous: if you can't manage 10 AI agents by Christmas, you're not making it to New Year's
Every single one of them is planning to announce these cuts as "AI transformation success stories"
While their stock options vest at record highs built on the backs of workers they're about to execute
The future of engineering is 3 humans with 50 AI agents in a WeWork somewhere while 500 families lose their homes
These data centres place a big strain on power and water resources.....and generate very few permanent operational jobs.
ReplyDeleteThe boom during construction is a one-time project base only