Kuala Lumpur : Malaysia needs sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to safeguard essential services and reduce its exposure to geopolitical uncertainty, said YTL AI Labs chief executive officer Foong Chee Mun.
He said AI would increasingly underpin government operations, businesses and supply chains, making a degree of self-reliance crucial as countries navigate a changing geopolitical landscape.
“AI is the most fundamental change of technology that we have in our lifetime,” he said.
Foong warned that dependence on foreign AI providers could expose countries to disruption if political tensions resulted in access being restricted.
“What we don’t want to do is that if our government gets into a certain political situation with countries that provide AI and the other country decides to shut it off, our government stops working, our enterprises stop working, our supply chain stops working,” he said.
He outlined five layers supporting sovereign AI: power, chips, cloud computing, intelligence models and applications.
Foong said YTL’s involvement in power generation, procurement of NVIDIA chips and development of YTL AI Cloud provided a foundation for its AI ambitions. Its work at the intelligence layer includes language models and capabilities involving voice, video understanding and text.
The company also wants to encourage Malaysian developers to build applications using that infrastructure.
“We want to encourage the builders in Malaysia to step into the age of AI,” he said.
Foong said YTL AI Cloud was located entirely in Malaysia, ensuring that data hosted on the platform remained in the country.
However, he stressed that the physical location of data was only one consideration. Hosting data locally through a foreign cloud operator could still expose it to legal obligations in the operator’s home jurisdiction, he said, citing the US CLOUD Act as an example.
While such arrangements could be acceptable for some applications, Foong said sensitive areas required greater consideration of sovereignty and control.
“Certain sensitive use cases such as judiciary, defence, healthcare might be better off with a full sovereign stack within Malaysia,” he said.
