Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, February 28th. Today on Forbes, billionaire Robert

Kwok's grandson drives $10 billion bet on AI data centers. The roots of Kwok Group, the conglomerate

founded by legendary business tycoon Robert Kwak, go back to 1949 in Malaysia's

Johor State, where he and his brothers started a business trading everyday items such as sugar,

rice, and flour. More than 75 years later, once sleepy Johor, cashing in on its plentiful land

and proximity to Singapore, has transformed

itself into a booming tech hub. There, in a homecoming of sorts, the Kwak Group has latched

on to the opportunity of selling a 21st century essential. Data Storage. Last October, the group's privately held unit K2 Strategic, led by the Patriarch's

41-year-old grandson, Kwok Meng Wei, opened a 60-mawatt data center, note that capacity is measured

by power consumption, at the 700-acre Sudanak Tech Park, one of a dozen digital hubs multiplying across Johor.

Located about 30 kilometers from the century-old causeway connecting Singapore and state capital

Jehor Baru, it has drawn some of the biggest data center players from around the world.

Meng Wei says, quote,

The data center industry is the hottest industry we've seen for decades.

AI workloads are driving the demand for data centers exponentially.

In Jhore, Ketu Strategic is currently the third biggest operator,

after Bain Capital's bridge data centers with 126 megawatts, and Day One, a unit of China's GDS with 115 megawatts,

according to London-based property consultancy Knight Frank.

Other players include Warburg-Pinkist-backed Princeton Digital Group and Malaysian Tycoon Francis I's YTL Corp, which is partnered with

AI chip developer, NVIDIA.

Meng Wei is reluctant to disclose the names of K2's existing clients, saying, quote,

we count two of the world's largest cloud service providers and the world's fastest growing

...