This page preserves a reference summary of Strategy 3: Escalating Digital Infrastructure to Enable AI from the National AI Roadmap 2021–2025, published by MOSTI (ISBN 978-967-19025-5-4) and reproduced for research and citation with attribution. The full text is in the Playbook PDF; the official copy is at mastic.mosti.gov.my. Independent four-year analysis of how this strategy fared is in Roadmap vs Reality.
AI runs on three things most people never see: somewhere to compute, somewhere to store data, and a network fast enough to move it. Strategy 3 was the roadmap’s recognition that none of the other five strategies could succeed without that substrate — and that, in 2021, Malaysia’s was uneven. The 2021 readiness survey had found most organisations at the “none” or “initial” stage for AI infrastructure and data.
The strategy aimed to close that gap on three fronts: cloud adoption across the economy, data infrastructure for AI consortia, and nationwide connectivity at a competitive cost.
What Strategy 3 set out to do
- Drive cloud adoption across business, with a headline goal of getting the great majority of Malaysian MSMEs onto cloud computing and storage suitable for AI.
- Build AI data infrastructure — storage and data-sharing capacity sized for the national AI use-case consortia.
- Enhance connectivity — competitive pricing, universal access, and nationwide high-speed broadband and 5G, leaning on national programmes already under way.
Targets at a glance
| Target | Horizon |
|---|---|
| 80% of MSMEs (~875,000) adopting cloud computing & storage for AI | H2–H3 |
| Two national studies on cloud adoption | H1 |
| 50 TB data storage per consortium project, per year | H1–H3 |
| Connectivity cost competitive with regional leaders (e.g. Singapore) | H2–H3 |
| 100% household & SME internet access; nationwide broadband / 5G | H1–H3 |
Built on existing national programmes
Strategy 3 did not propose to build connectivity from scratch. It explicitly leaned on Malaysia’s existing digital-infrastructure efforts — the JENDELA national broadband plan and the rollout of 5G — positioning AI as a demand driver for infrastructure the country was already laying. The data-sharing ambition also tied back to Strategy 1’s governance work on cross-government data.
This is the one area where the substrate genuinely arrived — but overwhelmingly through a private data-centre boom (Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Nvidia) worth tens of billions of ringgit, not the roadmap’s government programmes. The MSME cloud-adoption KPI itself was never publicly reported. See the data-centre build-out that actually happened →