THE CRUNCH
Malaysia is preparing a law that would require data centre operators to disclose their AI accelerator imports, power consumption, facility locations and the identities of operators and hyperscale customers, in an effort to stop restricted GPUs being legally imported and then smuggled abroad. Investment, Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani said on Thursday that some companies had rented space in Malaysian data centres to import GPUs legally before shipping them overseas. The Digital Ministry is reviewing whether existing legislation lets authorities act against entities that re-export processors subject to US export bans.
The oversight would run through a facility's lifetime rather than stopping at project approval. Operators would also have to pay for all the electricity capacity they reserve, whether or not they use it: a centre holding 100 MW but consuming 50 MW would still pay for the rest. That is meant to deter companies from reserving capacity they will not need for one to three years, and as a side effect makes it harder to pretend GPUs are running in Malaysia when they are not.
There is a catch. Power consumption alone cannot reliably reveal how many AI accelerators a facility actually runs. Nvidia's H100 and H200 SXM GPUs are rated at 700W and the B200 SXM at 1,000W, yet neither necessarily draws its rated power under real workloads, and without knowing server configurations, the draw of CPUs, memory, storage and networking, or a facility's power usage effectiveness, any estimate would be imprecise. Delays between GPU imports and deployment add further noise. Reliable verification would likely need physical inventory audits, and the minister did not say whether the law would require serial-number disclosure or on-site inspections.
Malaysia has approved 117 data centre projects, 55 of them already operational, and Johari said authorities were prepared to share information about facilities housing particular GPUs with US counterparts on request. The boom in local AI infrastructure is precisely what makes the country a convenient venue for rerouting restricted hardware: as the minister's framing suggests, it is easier to hide a needle in a pile of needles than in a haystack.