The Malaysian Government is in the final phase of negotiations with four multinational companies to develop cloud-based services facilities and data centers in the country.

Minister of Communications and Multimedia Tan Sri Annuar Musa said this week the Ministry of Finance has been informed that one negotiation had been completed and three were nearing completion to enable the international companies to make larger investments.

“One of these companies informed me that their investment is worth more than RM1 billion ($236m) for cloud computing and cloud services,” he said. Meanwhile, Annuar said there are at least three local and international companies planning to develop broadband services in Sarawak.

“They have met with the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia to disclose their plans to make another intercontinental cable, a submarine cable that will pass through northern Sarawak via the coast in the South China Sea,” he said.

ChinData subsidiary Bridge Data Centres recently announced that it had broken ground on a 100MW data center campus in the Kidex Sedenak business park in Sedenak, to the north of Johor. GDS is also building a 54MW campus in Johor's Nusajaya Tech Park.

In April Microsoft announced plans to establish its first Malay Azure cloud region in Kuala Lumpur but hasn’t a set date to bring the region online. Google hasn’t made any announcement around data centers in the country, and AWS currently only has an Edge facility in Kuala Lumpur.