Southeast Asia 3 will join Microsoft Azure's network of more than 70 global regions and follows the Malaysia West region, which Microsoft opened in May 2025 with three data centres in Greater Kuala Lumpur. Laurence Si, managing director of Microsoft Malaysia, said the Johor Bahru region will be connected to Microsoft's global Azure backbone of subsea and terrestrial fibre, and will support advanced workloads and AI services for public- and private-sector customers.
Malaysia's Minister of Digital, Gobind Singh Deo, said the milestone underlines the country's progress in the digital economy and its position as a secure and reliable location for organizations' digital assets. Microsoft also highlighted several sustainability measures for the Johor Bahru region, including backup generators that will run on renewable biofuel to reduce net carbon emissions.
Under its community program, Microsoft will run the Skills2Work Datacenter Foundations Program with The Asia Foundation and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia to train 150 recent graduates over 12 months for datacenter careers. It is also training 200 trainers from 20 social enterprises through UNDP Malaysia and BPEN Johor, aiming to reach approximately 10,000 community members.
Microsoft emphasized the growing adoption of its AI platform among Malaysian enterprises. AFFIN Group said it became the first bank in Asia Pacific to run a digital core banking platform on Microsoft Azure, while RHB Bank uses Azure OpenAI within Microsoft Teams for bilingual staff information retrieval. PETRONAS said it is building AI into its operations and decision-making processes. By October 2025, more than 734,000 people had been trained under AIForMYFuture, Microsoft's national skills program, against a target of 800,000 by the end of 2025. Laurence Si noted that Microsoft has been a trusted technology partner to Malaysia for more than 33 years.