It's threatening the construction boom, but it's still mostly American companies that are benefiting from an AI buildout, no matter where it happens globally (with the exception of China).
Google announced yesterday that they are pouring an additional 15 billion USD into Malaysia for compute. ByteDance is also building there, through DayOne. If you think about it, there aren't many reasons against constructing AI inference capacity outside the US. You tend to have less local resistance and there are plenty of countries with sufficient grid robustness and internet backbones. Malaysia already has many datacenters so this isn't novel.
LLMs typically don't have high latency sensitivity since reasoning models came around, so you aren't forced to build them near users, and East Asia is seeing lots of adoption anyways.
So all in all, I think US legislators are overestimating their leverage here
cyanydeez•28m ago
well, they have plenty of leverage, unless the technocrats want to try to run Argentina into the ground.
schleck8•36m ago
Google announced yesterday that they are pouring an additional 15 billion USD into Malaysia for compute. ByteDance is also building there, through DayOne. If you think about it, there aren't many reasons against constructing AI inference capacity outside the US. You tend to have less local resistance and there are plenty of countries with sufficient grid robustness and internet backbones. Malaysia already has many datacenters so this isn't novel.
LLMs typically don't have high latency sensitivity since reasoning models came around, so you aren't forced to build them near users, and East Asia is seeing lots of adoption anyways.
So all in all, I think US legislators are overestimating their leverage here
cyanydeez•28m ago