AI Leadership Requires Capability, Continuous Innovation -- YTL
KUALA LUMPUR, July 17 (Bernama) -- Countries seeking leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) must build domestic capabilities across the AI ecosystem rather than rely on technologies developed elsewhere, YTL Power International Bhd managing director Datuk Seri Yeoh Seok Hong said.
In a statement today, Yeoh said the global AI race was shifting beyond adoption towards developing the infrastructure and expertise needed to build, deploy and control AI.
“The real question is whether countries will adopt AI built elsewhere or build the capability to develop, deploy and control AI on their own terms.
“Malaysia already has the foundation. It is one of the few countries with capabilities across all five layers — energy, data centres, cloud, models and applications — built by Malaysians for Malaysian needs. That places Malaysia in a position to lead in ASEAN and beyond,” he said.
Yeoh said the opportunity now was for Malaysians to make full use of these capabilities by strengthening cooperation across industry, academia and government.
Such collaboration, he said, would help Malaysia develop into an AI-driven nation capable of shaping its own technological future.
Elaborating on the five layers, Yeoh said energy formed the foundation of the AI ecosystem, as training and operating advanced models required a large and continuous supply of electricity.
“An interruption can set a training run back by days. A country that relies on external energy for its AI ambitions inherits that dependency before a single chip or model is involved,” he said.
He said data centres provided the physical infrastructure that converted energy into usable computing capacity, while their location determined the laws governing the hardware and how quickly capacity could be expanded.
Cloud infrastructure, meanwhile, transformed data centre hardware into computing resources that businesses and researchers could rent without owning or managing the machines themselves.
“Most countries and businesses rent this layer from a small number of foreign hyperscalers, as building it requires significant capital and technical validation,” he said.
Yeoh said foundation models formed the underlying intelligence of AI systems by interpreting users’ requests and generating responses.
“If a model is built and governed by a foreign company, its behaviour and limitations are shaped by that company's priorities, usually for a broad global audience, with local markets adapted later,” he said.
Applications, he said, represented the final layer, where AI capabilities were translated into services for end users.
“In Malaysia, that convergence already exists through the capability to build autonomous AI agents, an AI-powered digital bank and an AI-first telecommunications provider, bringing AI services directly to millions of users,” he added.
-- BERNAMA