Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, November 11th.

Today on Forbes, the Asian billionaires riding the data center boom.

Nestled in the foothills of Mount Puli in Malaysia's southern state of Jehor, and surrounded

by palm oil plantations, four windowless single-story buildings amid a steady drone 24-7.

This comes from powerful supercomputers simultaneously running cloud computing and artificial

intelligence applications, some using Nvidia's most advanced GB-200 chips.

Capable of processing 1.8 terabytes of information per second, these GPUs are housed in a

20 megawatt facility within a 664 hectare data center park, operated by YTL Power International,

the utility unit of Malaysian Tycoon, Francis EO's YTL conglomerate. Inside the building are three-meter-tall

fans blowing cold air onto rows of server racks interconnected by kilometers of cables.

Two years ago, the American chip giant announced a $4.3 billion plan to develop AI infrastructure with YTL and Johor, of which

$2.4 billion has already been spent, building 200 megawatts of data center capacity.

The high-profile collaboration vindicated YTL's 2021 bet on the business.

In a video call from the group's headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Yohoyang Han, Yatel Powers Executive Director

and the elder Y'o's nephew, recalls, quote,

people said we were crazy to think we could build the equivalent of Singapore's total

data center capacity in Jihore.

YTL's timing was fortuitous, dovetailing with Malaysia's ambitions to become a digital hub,

and Jahor, blessed with plentiful land, electricity, and water, key essentials for data centers,

emerged as a hotspot. At the Settanak Tech Park, 28 kilometers northwest of the YTL complex,

Malaysian billionaire Robert Kwak's K2 Strategic, helmed by his 42-year-old grandson, Kwak-Mung-We,

aims to quadruple its data center capacity in Malaysia to 240 megawatts in a few years.

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