Microsoft Corp (MSFT) plans to invest $1 billion in Malaysia over the upcoming five years in a new partnership with government agencies and domestic companies, the country’s Prime Minister announced earlier this week.
As part of the Bersama Malaysia initiative, the US tech company will build its first datacentre region in Malaysia in order to manage data from a number of countries, the nation’s Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said.
“The upcoming datacenter region will be a game-changer for Malaysia,” Microsoft Corp’s Executive Vice President Jean-Philippe Courtois said in a statement, cited by Reuters.
Microsoft shares closed lower for a second consecutive trading session on NASDAQ on Tuesday. The stock went down 0.19% ($0.48) to $258.26, after touching an intraday low at $256.87, or a price level not seen since April 14th ($255.19).
Shares of Microsoft Corporation have risen 16.11% so far in 2021 compared with a 10.09% gain for the benchmark index, S&P 500 (SPX).
In 2020, Microsoft Corp’s stock went up 41.04%, thus, it again outperformed the S&P 500, which registered a 16.26% gain.
Courtois also noted that the project would allow the government and businesses to transform their operations.
It will also be Microsoft’s most considerable investment in the Southeast Asian country.
In February, Malaysia gave conditional approvals for Google, Amazon, Microsoft and state telecoms company Telekom Malaysia to establish and manage hyper-scale data centres on its soil and offer cloud services.
Malaysia had said that total investments from cloud service providers would be between 12 billion ringgits and 15 billion ringgits ($2.91 billion-$3.64 billion*) over the upcoming five-year period.
*1 US Dollar equals 4.1173 Malaysian Ringgits
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