Why Huawei chose Malaysia for its most important AI centre outside China

• Huawei’s first AI incubation centre outside China lands in Malaysia, cementing the country’s position in the company’s global AI strategy
• Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s remarks at the launch were less a speech and more a Malaysia AI sovereignty statement–and that distinction matters

There is a version of yesterday’s Huawei AI Lab and Innovation Centre launch at The Exchange 106, Kuala Lumpur that writes itself–anniversary milestone, government endorsement, ribbon cut, photos taken. Every tech publication in the region will file that version. But the more consequential story was in what was actually said, by whom, and what it reveals about where Malaysia has chosen to stand on one of the defining technology questions of this decade.

What 25 years have actually built

To understand what the AI Lab represents, you need to understand what Huawei already is in Malaysia, because Wind Li, vice president and CEO of Huawei Global Sector Business at Huawei, was not overselling when he described the country as Huawei’s “overseas home.”

Huawei entered Malaysia on April 25, 2001. Today, it employs over 4,000 people here, more than 80% of whom are local hires. Its Asia Pacific headquarters is in Malaysia. So, is it the only global training centre outside China. It operates 11 shared services centres on Malaysian soil and has trained over 72,000 ICT professionals through programmes spanning the Huawei ASEAN Academy, Huawei ICT Academies and the Huawei-MCMC Digital Leadership Excellence Programme.

The company’s reach into Malaysia’s infrastructure is equally substantial. Huawei has been supporting U Mobile’s second 5G network since 2025, and in March 2026, Ookla’s Speedtest Award recognised that network as delivering the fastest 5G speeds in Malaysia. Huawei claims its solutions reach approximately 97% of Malaysia’s national population, though the company has not detailed how that figure is measured or independently verified.

The AI Lab, then, is not a beginning. As Li put it, the new centre spanning 13,638 square feet at TRX is “the first centre of its kind outside China”; Huawei’s first AI-enabled industrial incubation base globally beyond its home market. That it landed in Kuala Lumpur, and not Singapore, Tokyo or any Western-aligned tech hub, is a choice worth sitting with.

What the centre is actually built to do

Li was specific about the centre’s purpose in a way the press materials were not. Beyond the showcase function–demonstrating Huawei’s enterprise solutions across government, finance, education and healthcare–the centre is designed to incubate locally-adapted AI applications for Malaysian industries and deepen what Li called “ecosystem partner” collaboration. Huawei has cultivated over 80 ecosystem partners in Malaysia and works with more than 1,000 local enterprise partners. The centre gives that network a formal home.

On talent, Huawei’s ambitions extend beyond ICT training into specialised AI capability building, with the centre serving as an anchor for that effort. A concrete signal of where Huawei sees vertical opportunity came in an unexpected detail from Li’s speech: a collaboration with a local Malaysian university on a diabetes risk study, tied to the upcoming Huawei Watch FIT 5 Pro.

With one in five Malaysian adults living with diabetes–approximately 4.75 million people, nearly half of whom remain undiagnosed–Li framed the wearable’s preventive health features as a genuine public health intervention, not a consumer product launch. Health technology is clearly being added to Huawei’s existing vertical priorities in Malaysia.

Li also pointed to the broader strategic ambition underpinning all of this. Huawei has reinvested more than 20% of its annual revenue into R&D over the past five years, with over US$27 billion invested in research last year alone. The goal, in Li’s framing, is to “turn data into intelligence, and intelligence into real impact”, building full-stack AI capabilities across the entire data lifecycle, from distribution and transmission through to processing, storage and reasoning.

The sovereignty statement hiding in plain sight

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s speech was where the event became something more than a launch. He did not confine his remarks to Malaysia’s digital roadmap or congratulate Huawei and move on. Instead, he delivered a candid assessment of AI’s implications for jobs, institutional readiness and the pace at which governments–including his own–are keeping up with technological disruption.

He warned that those most exposed to AI’s reshaping of work are often those with the least capacity to adapt, and that the window for building sound governance frameworks is narrowing.

But his sharpest remarks were directed outward. Anwar pushed back explicitly against what he described as the doctrine that “certain forms of technology found in the West must dictate our policies.”

He invoked Edward Said’s Orientalism, the foundational critique of how Western frameworks position non-Western cultures as inferior or subordinate, and rejected the framing of Western technological supremacy as a justification for dictating other nations’ infrastructure choices. The colonial mindset, he said plainly, “was wrong then and it is wrong now.”

This was not abstract philosophy. Malaysia has faced sustained pressure, as have other Southeast Asian nations, over its continued engagement with Huawei at a time when the United States and its allies have moved systematically to exclude the company from their own critical infrastructure.

Anwar’s remarks were a direct response to that pressure–delivered, pointedly, at a Huawei event, with the MCMC chairman seated in the room. His closing line on the matter crystallised the Malaysia AI sovereignty position his government has been building toward: “While the technology may come from anywhere, the rules will be made in Malaysia.”

It is an endorsement of Huawei’s presence and a boundary condition simultaneously. Malaysia is open, but not unconditionally so.

The infrastructure question underneath it all

What gives that sovereignty declaration its complexity is the depth of Huawei’s existing footprint. A company that is embedded in connectivity infrastructure, talent pipelines, enterprise solutions and now AI incubation, is not a vendor relationship that pivots easily. Malaysia is not merely hosting a facility.

It has, over 25 years, built its digital infrastructure in significant part around a single company that the Western-aligned world continues to treat as a security risk. Anwar’s promise that the rules will be made in Malaysia is the right instinct.

Whether the governance frameworks being developed–the National AI Office, the AI governance framework, the data protection regime–are being built quickly enough, and with enough independence, to give that promise real substance is the question that yesterday’s speeches did not answer, and that Malaysia’s technology community will be watching closely in the months ahead.

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