Billionaire Robert Kuok’s Grandson Drives $10 Billion Bet On AI Data Centers
The roots of Kuok Group, the conglomerate founded by legendary business tycoon Robert Kuok, go back to 1949 in Malaysia’s Johor state, where he and his brothers started a business trading everyday items such as sugar, rice and flour. More than 75 years later, once-sleepy Johor, cashing in on its plentiful land and proximity to Singapore, has transformed itself into a booming tech hub. There, in a homecoming of sorts, the Kuok Group has latched on to the opportunity of selling a 21st century essential: data storage.
Last October, the group’s privately held unit K2 Strategic, led by the patriarch’s 41-year-old grandson Kuok Meng Wei, opened a 60 megawatt (MW) data center—capacity is measured by power consumption—at the 700-acre Sedenak Tech Park, one of a dozen digital hubs multiplying across Johor. Located about 30 kilometers from the century-old causeway connect-ing Singapore and state capital Johor Bahru, it has drawn some of the biggest data center players from around the world.
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“The data center industry is the hottest industry we’ve seen for decades,” says Meng Wei. “AI workloads are driving the demand for data centers exponentially.”
In Johor, K2 Strategic is currently the third-biggest operator, after Bain Capital’s Bridge Data Centres, with 126MW, and DayOne (a unit of China’s GDS) with 115MW, according to London-based property consultancy Knight Frank. Other players include Warburg Pincus-backed Princeton Digital Group and Malaysian tycoon Francis Yeoh’s YTL Corp., which has partnered with AI chip developer Nvidia. Meng Wei is reluctant to disclose the names of K2’s existing clients, saying, “We count two of the world’s largest cloud service providers and the world’s fastest-growing social media firm among our list of customers.”
K2’s managing director and CEO says the data center boom is similar to the “large macro wave” the Kuok Group rode when China opened up under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, unleashing demand for necessities like edible oil and other agri-commodities. Confident that riding this new wave will pay off, Meng Wei is doubling down with plans to invest a whopping $9 billion over the next five years on top of the $1 billion he’s already spent. The bulk has been earmarked for building data center capacity in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
These countries, which are Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing data storage hubs, according to Knight Frank, have benefited from Singapore’s 2019 moratorium on building data centers due to constraints on land and electricity supply. The moratorium was lifted in 2022, but new buildouts continued in Malaysia and elsewhere as Singapore imposed more stringent requirements.
Data Centers
Big money is pouring into the data center boom in the region. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are fast-expanding their digital footprint across Southeast Asia, with plans to invest more than a combined $44 billion in the next few years. Just over half of that amount—$23 billion—is targeted for Malaysia.
Despite the rapid buildup, industry players are confident demand is sustainable. “The industry is not overbuilding capacity just yet,” says Otto Toto Sugiri, billionaire cofounder and CEO of Jakarta-listed DCI Indonesia, that country’s largest data center provider. (At the end of 2024, it operated seven centers with a combined capacity of 83MW.) Meng Wei is scaling up fast. His goal is to increase K2’s capacity tenfold to 1,200MW by 2030 from 120MW currently. To achieve this, he’s scouting for new sites in Malaysia outside the Sedenak campus, which he expects to be fully occupied within the next two to three years. Simultaneously, he’s expanding in Indonesia where K2 Strategic has partnered with the billionaire Widjaja family’s Sinar Mas Land. They’ve acquired two sites in Bekasi in eastern Jakarta, covering over 40 acres, where they plan to develop more than 100MW.
Meng Wei is scaling up fast. His goal is to increase K2’s capacity tenfold to 1,200MW by 2030 from 120MW currently. To achieve this, he’s scouting for new sites in Malaysia outside the Sedenak campus, which he expects to be fully occupied within the next two to three years. Simultaneously, he’s expanding in Indonesia where K2 Strategic has partnered with the billionaire Widjaja family’s Sinar Mas Land. They’ve acquired two sites in Bekasi in eastern Jakarta, covering over 40 acres, where they plan to develop more than 100MW.
The “K” in K2 Strategic doesn’t stand for Kuok; the name is from the world’s second-tallest mountain, which is a steeper, more difficult climb than Everest. Its peak at 8,600 meters above sea level is where “the clouds touch the ground,” Meng Wei says. K2 Strategic’s revenue has been climbing, touching nearly $100 million in 2024 from $3 million in 2018, when it opened its first data center in Ireland, much before Southeast Asia became a data center hotspot. (The unlisted company doesn’t disclose other financial numbers.)
The Kuok Family Ties
Kuok Meng Wei belongs to the third generation of an entrepreneurial family that’s made its mark in Southeast Asia and China. His grandfather Robert Kuok, a giant in business, who celebrated his 101st birthday in October, started trading commodities after World War II and expanded into logistics and hotels as well as shipping and shipbuilding.
In 1997, Robert appeared on the cover of Forbes, where he was called “The World’s Shrewdest Businessman.” The fortune he amassed along the way earned him the title of Malaysia’s richest person, a position he continues to hold. While he was often referred to as Asia’s sugar king, he also set up the luxury Shangri-La Hotels chain. Today, the Kuok Group has more than 100 hotels and resorts in almost 80 destinations under the Hong Kong-listed company.
In the third generation, Meng Wei’s older brother, Meng Xiong, referred to as MX, manages the family-backed private equity firm K3 Ventures, which has invested in more than 50 startups including TikTok parent ByteDance and ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab.
Meng Wei says that age has not withered his grandfather’s passion for business. “He still keeps his energy high and stays on top of developments.” After reading media reports about global companies planning data centers in Malaysia, Robert messaged his grandson: “What’s going on? Give me an update.”
