By Rozanna Latiff and Fanny Potkin

KUALA LUMPUR Dec 8 – Nvidia NVDA.O is in advanced talks with Malaysian conglomerate YTL YTLS.KL on a data centre deal, three sources familiar with the matter said, as the U.S chip giant looks for more business from Southeast Asia.

The potential tie-up would include collaborating on cloud infrastructure, and is likely to be anchored at YTL’s data centre complex in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, bordering Singapore, one of the people said.

The partnership would offer businesses in Southeast Asia access to Nvidia’s AI chips via cloud computing, a second person briefed on the matter said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was visiting Malaysia on Friday, declined to comment directly on a potential deal.

“YTL is an extraordinary company, (Malaysia) is an important hub for SEA (Southeast Asia) computing infrastructure, which requires access to land, facilities and power, and YTL could play a great role in that,” he told Reuters at a news conference. “It would be a privilege for us to partner with YTL in any way.”

Southeast Asia has become increasingly important for Nvidia as a “growing technology hub,” with Huang telling reporters he was considering artificial intelligence infrastructure projects in Singapore or Malaysia. He said this week the company would “potentially announce some large investments” in Singapore.

About $2.7 billion of the company’s revenues, or 15%, in the quarter that ended in October came from Singapore, a 401% jump from the same period last year. Singapore hosts many of the Asian headquarters of U.S and Chinese technology giants, and more than 1,100 AI startups.

The CEO told reporters on Friday that Nvidia was working with 80 startups in Malaysia.

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff in Kuala Lumpur, Fanny Potkin and Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore, and Max Cherney in San Francisco Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Gerry Doyle)

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Original: NVDA Feed: Nvidia in talks with Malaysia’s YTL on data centre deal -sources