Written by Dave Platter, Global PR Director
Fears about DeepSeek’s impact on Malaysia’s data centre market are turning into excitement, according to analysis from Juwai IQI Co-Founder and Group CEO, Kashif Ansari. His insights were featured in more than a dozen media outlets this month in Malaysia and China. “DeepSeek shocked the world with a large language model that seems comparable to those offered by competitors like OpenAI, but at a fraction of the cost,” said Mr. Ansari.
“Cheaper AI models like DeepSeek’s will most likely drive demand for data centres in Malaysia even higher. That’s because cheaper AI will enable the widespread use of AI-powered tools that, until now, have been too expensive to be widely adopted.”
According to Mr. Ansari, large language models need to become more affordable before AI can be widely used. That’s one reason the world’s largest AI companies have, until now, earned very little revenue to offset their enormous expenses.
Mr. Ansari said, “DeepSeek seems to have made massive progress in affordability. It charges just one-fifteenth of what its more established competitor, Anthropic, charges for tokens.
“You can put it this way: when it costs less to get an AI model to do something, people will start asking AI to do more and more tasks. That growth will create unprecedented demand for data centres, including in Malaysia. “For the real estate industry here in Malaysia, this means
that demand for land suitable for data centres will remain strong — and could possibly grow.”
Mr. Ansari pointed out that Malaysia stands to benefit significantly from the advancements DeepSeek appears to be bringing about.
“Until this month, we all thought Malaysia would need billions of dollars to build its own language model,” he said. “But now it looks like Malaysia could afford to create its own language models and deploy AI into research, education, and the broader economy.”
“Malaysian consumers will also benefit because cheap AI will be integrated into the tools and services they rely on every day. For AI to truly transform the daily lives of the rakyat, it needs to be affordable and accessible to all.”
He added, “We weren’t able to put a mobile phone into everyone’s hands until they became inexpensive enough, and we won’t be able to provide people with the benefits of AI-powered tools and services unless they are just as affordable. After the DeepSeek earthquake, it is suddenly possible to imagine AI powering more and more of the services we use daily. AI has the potential to impact our lives as profoundly as electricity once did”.