Tencent Cloud, the cloud unit of Chinese technology giant Tencent, will establish its first cloud region in Malaysia, comprising up to three availability zones in Johor, and will work with a local university to train more than 1,000 people in AI and cloud skills.
Tencent Cloud announced its plan in a statement on Tuesday, as part of Tencent Cloud’s C-Suite Dialogue conference in Malaysia, without any financial details.
The cloud region will connect Malaysia to Tencent Cloud’s international network, covering 66 availability zones across 23 regions. It can give local businesses infrastructure to run AI applications and data-heavy services.
Tencent’s move adds to a wave of data-center investment in Malaysia, with Johor becoming a hub thanks to its proximity to Singapore. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have each announced multibillion-ringgit investments in the country.
Alongside the infrastructure, Tencent Cloud showcased AI products including WorkBuddy, an agentic AI workspace tool; an Agent Development Platform for building custom AI agents; and TokenHub, which provides access to multiple large language models through a single interface. It also pointed to its large language model, Hy3, formerly known as Hunyuan.
Besides, Tencent Cloud company announced new collaborations with the Malaysian fintech firm Boost and with Genting Plantations Group, adding to existing work with partners such as Ryt Bank. Tencent Cloud will utilize its technology to power conversational banking for more than 1.5 million users, and YTL Communications, which uses its identity-verification tools.
The talent partnership, with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, will include a hackathon, a train-the-trainer program, and a certification course for more than 1,000 students and educators. Mohd Shafry bin Mohd Rahim, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the collaboration would help connect academic learning with the skills used in industry.
Bluefin Jiannan Zhao, a vice-president of Tencent Cloud and managing director of Tencent Cloud International for Asia-Pacific, said Malaysia was a key market in the company’s regional strategy and that the cloud region would help enterprises scale locally and expand across the region.
China’s Tencent makes AI model Hy3 available globally through WorkBuddy, cloud, developer platforms