USA technology giant Oracle announced on Wednesday that it plans to invest over $6.5 billion to build its first public cloud region in Malaysia, marking the latest major investment by global technology companies in the Southeast Asian country.

Since last year, tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Google have announced investments in Malaysia, mainly in the areas of cloud services and data centers, joining the infrastructure boom driven by the increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI).

A cloud region is the physical geographic location where a company's public cloud facilities are located. Oracle's project will be one of the largest single tech investments in Malaysia to date, exceeding the $6.2 billion investment plan announced by Amazon's cloud computing division AWS.

In a statement, Oracle expressed that the planned public cloud region will help Malaysian organizations modernize their applications, migrate their workloads to the cloud, and innovate through data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Garret Ilg, Oracle's Executive Vice President for Japan and the Asia Pacific region, also stated that this will allow the company's Malaysian clients (including government agencies, financial institutions, airlines, and hotel companies) to use cloud services based in the country rather than external ones.

Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President responsible for technology and customer strategy in Japan and the Asia Pacific region for Oracle, stated that Malaysia provides the company with further growth potential and market opportunities, as part of the company's broader push for artificial intelligence and data center development in Southeast Asia.