March 19, 2024, KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysian conglomerate YTL Group is turning to the latest chips from semiconductor giant Nvidia as it pushes to build one of the world's fastest AI supercomputers.
YTL said that it is launching, via its subsidiary YTL Power International, Malaysia's first artificial intelligence cloud, which will deploy Nvidia's new Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU), according to a YTL news release on Monday in the U.S., where it participated in Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.
The YTL AI Cloud is large-scale GPU-based computing. Nvidia announced its Blackwell GPU on Monday at the conference.
YTL said that it will be installing Nvidia's GB200 NVL72, a rack-scale system which will connect 36 Grace central processing units (CPUs) and 72 Blackwell GPUs to act as a single massive GPU. The YTL AI Supercomputer is expected to surpass more than 300 exaflops of AI computing, which would making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, YTL said in a statement. One exaflop equals a quintillion floating point operations per second.
In May 2022, Hewlett Packard's AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer, located in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S., made headlines as the world's fastest supercomputer, clocking 1.6 exaflops. Frontier's innovation opened the era of exascale supercomputers and it was also named as one of Time's 200 best inventions in 2023.
"Nvidia is working with YTL AI Cloud to bring a world-class accelerated computing platform to Southeast Asia -- helping drive scientific research, innovation and economic growth across the region," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in the YTL release. Huang added that the supercomputer marks one of the first deployments of the Blackwell GPU on Nvidia's DGX Cloud platform, supporting the growth of accelerated computing in the Asia-Pacific region.
"We are excited to bring this supercomputing power to the Asia-Pacific region, which has been home to many of the fastest-growing cloud regions and many of the most innovative users of AI in the world," Yeoh Seok Hong, managing director at YTL Power International, said in the release.
The YTL AI Supercomputer will be situated within the YTL Green Data Center Campus, which is under construction and will span 1,640 acres (664 hectares) in Kulai in the southern state of Johor. According to YTL, the data center will be powered by a 500- megawatt on-site solar facility.
In December, YTL Power announced a 20 billion ringgit ($4.29 billion) collaboration with Nvidia to build an AI data center and it is expected to be operational by the middle of 2024 using Nvidia technology and software to streamline production of AI and data.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said in the release that the formation of AI Cloud is a significant milestone, being the first in Malaysia which will "accelerate the country's adoption of AI and spearhead the development of Sovereign Cloud."
"Sovereign cloud" is a term referring to digital data sovereignty that advocates for the authority of nation states to govern and regulate digital businesses and data within their own territories, according to Accenture.
Last week, the European Parliament passed the world's first AI regulation act which 17 "aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI while boosting innovation."
