Malaysia is pretty big on assembling chips for big-name chipmakers such as Intel, AMD and Foxconn. One Bloomberg report even notes that the country “packages roughly a tenth of the world’s semiconductors”. But more importantly, the report notes our country’s ambitions to be move “beyond chip assembly and more into valuable semiconductor production”. And to that end, the government has inked a deal with Arm spanning 10 years.
As part of the deal, Malaysia will be paying the UK-based company US$250 million (~RM1.11 billion) over the course of the decade. In return, Arm will be providing the country with “a slew of semiconductor-related licenses and know-how”. All of this will in turn be used to help local companies design their own chips, with a target of semiconductor exports totalling RM1.2 trillion by 2030.
In a statement to the news outlet, Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli was quoted as saying ” the government has taken a radical approach … with the perspective of building the whole ecosystem”. The deal will reportedly help create as many as 10 chip companies within Malaysia, with a total annual revenue of US$20 billion (~RM88.96 million).
Earlier in the year, Rafizi said that Malaysia aims to locally manufacture its own GPUs within the next five to 10 years. There is also a chip-design hub called the Malaysia Semiconductor IC Design Park in Puchong, Selangor, with the aforementioned Arm being one of the partners in the endeavour.
(Source: Bloomberg)
