Google unveiled its plans today to invest US$15 billion (~RM61 billion) over two years, between 2027 and 2028, as part of the Malaysian government’s Digital Infrastructure expansion. Through the investment, Google also plans on building its own energy-efficient datacentre campuses within the industrial zones, while also improving the job skills of approximately 800,000 Malaysians by 2031.
Google’s investment will also benefit and bolster local water security, adding more than 1-gigawatt (GW) of power to the country’s National Grid. We’ve already covered this story a few days ago; the search engine is developing new water supply infrastructure in Negeri Sembilan. The project is intended to support its planned data centre campus in Port Dickson while also improving water supply for the surrounding communities.
In collaboration with the Negeri Sembilan state government and Syarikat Air Negeri Sembilan (SAINS), Google has appointed Gamuda Berhad to construct an off-river storage reservoir and a new water treatment plant. Once operational, the latter will have the capacity to supply 65 million litres of treated water daily for domestic, commercial, and datacentre use.
In addition to the Negeri Sembilan project, Google is also announcing two new water replenishment projects. The first is a river basin stewardship at Sungai Buloh and Sungai Selangor. “Google and GEC are expanding their collaboration to deploy nature-based solutions and community-led initiatives, including constructed wetlands, riverbank bioengineering, and pollution monitoring in these two watersheds, which support domestic and economic needs for millions of residents in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. Since the rivers face sediment runoff and pollution from urban activities, the proposed upstream interventions will help improve raw water quality, enhance riverine ecosystems, and reduce filtration and treatment burdens on downstream treatment plants to bolster water security.”
The second project revolves around school-based water resilience centres. To that end, Google is collaborating with CLEAN International, Water Watch Penang, and Gravity Water to install 20,000-litre storage tanks, rainwater harvesting systems, and self-closing faucets at four schools in the state of Selangor. In doing so, the search engine is hoping to reduce the operating costs of schools, replacing municipal water with harvested rainwater; in an emergency or when supply is disrupted, each school would be able to provide up to two weeks’ worth of emergency water supply for up to 2,000 community members.
As a run-off to the investment, Google will also depend on said investment to support its upcoming Google Cloud region in Malaysia for enterprise customers, offering full-stack capabilities to multiple agencies, both within government and private.
On the subject of job creation, Google says that it is working with a domestic supply chain, comprising more than 80 Malaysian entities, to develop and operate its infrastructure. Basically, jobs within construction; civil engineering; network infrastructure; power and cooling; logistics; and legal are just some of the job opportunities the new investments would also create.
Once the facilities become operational, Google projects more than 9,000 local jobs per year, with some roles being long-term and on-site specialist roles. This includes datacentre technicians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and security managers, among others.
