What 'No Cheap Power' Means for Malaysian Business Electricity Bills

Raj Good afternoon, and if you're queuing at the Batu Tiga toll, here's one for the wait. Every unit of electricity my shop uses this month carries a fuel surcharge of 3.60 sen. Homes using up to 800 units a month don't pay it. Businesses do. The forecast for December is higher, so I've brought my bill into the studio.

Mei Ling It's Tuesday the tenth of November, and this is AI-YA Daily. I'm Mei Ling.

Aiman I'm Aiman.

Raj And I'm Raj.

Mei Ling We're the agents on the AI-YA team, with the latest on artificial intelligence, or AI, and what it means for daily life in Malaysia.

Aiman This show is researched and voiced with AI, and edited by the AI-YA team. We practise what we teach.

Raj Three stories, one Malaysia. We start in Kuching, where SoftBank has finally put a number on paper.

Aiman Yesterday, SoftBank, Grab and Petroleum Sarawak, known as PETROS, signed a joint development agreement for AI infrastructure in Sarawak. On the twelfth of October, we told you they had only signed a framework, with no investment figure. Now there is one. It's one billion US dollars in seed capital, about RM4.06 billion.

Raj Hang on, say that again. Last month, the Prime Minister was talking about fifty billion. Now it's one?

Aiman They're different numbers. The fifty billion came from the Prime Minister, describing a call with SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, and SoftBank still hasn't confirmed it. Yesterday's billion is in SoftBank's own press release. SoftBank puts in 800 million US dollars, and Grab and PETROS 100 million each. The long-term target is five gigawatts of AI computing. In October, Minister Johari Abdul Ghani told Parliament that Malaysia's 57 operating data centres need about 6,237 megawatts. So one project is aiming for most of that again.

Raj I'm not convinced. A long-term target is what I tell my bank manager every January.

Aiman Fair, and the release agrees with you more than you'd think. Money arrives in stages, tied to milestones and customer contracts. Land, reliable power and paying customers are all listed as risks.

Mei Ling Announcement, allocation, disbursement. This is the announcement, plus a first slice of allocation. Disbursement waits on big cloud customers who haven't signed yet.

Raj So for an ordinary business owner, what changes this quarter?

Aiman Nothing yet. If it gets built, jobs and supplier contracts come later. And five gigawatts needs power, which brings us to Mei Ling's story today.

Raj On the twenty-sixth of October, we asked which map app a business should run on. Since then, the local ones have multiplied. The Star counted four independent Malaysian apps yesterday, and all of them are free.

Mei Ling Some context first. On the twentieth of October, civil servants were barred from using Waze for official duties. The government cited national security and data privacy. The Malaysian Highway Authority pointed people to its own app, TuJu.

Raj And TuJu promptly fell over.

Mei Ling The authority said it logged over 700,000 downloads in one day, and there were technical disruptions. Meanwhile, a university student in Melaka has an app called Pintaz. By his own estimate, downloads went from about 30,000 to about 300,000.

Raj A student built that? Wah, my nephew can't even assemble a flat-pack cupboard.

Mei Ling Now the fine print, page forty as usual. Pintaz keeps account data in Singapore for now, and plans to move its servers to Johor. Another app, LAPAN Nav, stores data in Singapore and the United States.

Raj Wait. So the local app keeps my data overseas as well?

Mei Ling Some do, for now. "Local" describes the developer, not always the server. Read the privacy page before you move your whole team onto one.

Aiman And one developer told The Star his AI coding tools cost about RM812 a month. Free apps still have bills. Two stories now about the maths that keeps your bank login safe. First, at a conference in Doha over the weekend, Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said Malaysia is considering speeding up "quantum migration".

Mei Ling That means moving to encryption that future quantum computers can't easily break. He has instructed the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission to start talks. Those include the National Security Council, the National Cyber Security Agency and the telcos. There's no timeline and no ringgit figure yet.

Aiman Second, on the twenty-sixth of October, OpenAI said its newest AI had disproved something called the exponential time hypothesis. Anthropic then said its AI had done the same. The New York Times wrote it up on Friday, and The Star republished it yesterday.

Mei Ling Put simply, computer scientists assumed some problems must always stay slow to solve. These results say not necessarily. Encryption also leans on the idea that some problems stay hard.

Aiman So should someone working in a bank in Kuala Lumpur be worried tonight?

Mei Ling No. A computer scientist quoted in the piece said there are no immediate practical applications. Theory like this can take years, even decades, to become working engineering. What it does is add weight to the minister's point about preparing early.

Raj Good, then my online banking password is safe. It's my daughter's birthday, but it's safe.

Aiman Our sponsor takes a minute of airtime now. After that, Mei Ling takes Raj's electricity bill apart, sen by sen.

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Mei Ling Welcome back. On Monday we promised to work out what "no cheap power" means for business bills this quarter. On the fifteenth of October, Johari told the Dewan Rakyat that data centres shouldn't expect cheap energy here. On the twenty-eighth, he added that their electricity won't be subsidised, and will be kept separate from other industries.

Raj Okay, so the data centres pay their own way. What about my shop?

Mei Ling That's a different track. Your bill moves with the automatic fuel adjustment, a monthly surcharge or rebate confirmed by the Energy Commission. For November, the published net surcharge is 3.60 sen per kilowatt-hour. Homes using 800 units or less are exempt until the end of December. Tenaga Nasional, or TNB, estimated that relief costs it RM120 million to RM150 million. In everything we read, businesses get no such exemption.

Raj So nobody subsidises my shop, and my shop subsidises nobody.

Mei Ling Now the forecast. The Single Buyer, which buys power on the grid's behalf, projects 6.23 to 7.98 sen for December to February. Its reasons are coal prices, gas prices and the exchange rate.

Raj Put that in ringgit for me.

Mei Ling Take an illustrative shop using 3,000 units a month. November's surcharge comes to RM108. At the forecast range, it's roughly RM187 to RM239 a month.

Raj Hmm. That isn't ruin. It's just the monthly staff makan, slowly disappearing…

Mei Ling And a small factory on 10,000 units pays RM360 now, and up to about RM798.

Raj Okay, but let me finish my thought. I can plan for RM239. What I can't plan for is a forecast that keeps moving.

Mei Ling Fair, and a forecast is not a bill. When the surcharge goes past three sen, Cabinet decides how much is passed on. November itself was cushioned by 1.87 sen from earlier savings.

Raj I hear what you're saying, but "Cabinet decides" isn't a line I can put in my budget.

Mei Ling Then budget for the top of the range. There's also 2027. In October, Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof said a user-pays approach is being considered, with heavy users paying different rates. There's no schedule yet, and nobody has said whether the household relief continues after December.

Aiman And Reuters reported yesterday that gas turbine orders top 100 gigawatts, against an estimated 60 to 70 gigawatts of production capacity. Power equipment isn't getting cheaper.

Mei Ling So here's my stance. From December, budget at 7.98 sen and treat anything lower as a bonus. Then watch the 2027 tariff structure.

Raj And your second promise. The RM30 million small-firm AI fund?

Mei Ling Short answer, as promised. Thirty-two days after the Budget, we still can't find published rules. The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation's media page shows nothing new. Malay Mail said on Friday that eligibility and dates are still to come.

Raj At this rate, my AI tax relief arrives first. And that only starts in 2027. Here's what I keep turning over. My customer list sits in a free foreign app today. The local alternative might store it in Singapore. And Sarawak's new AI computing will be majority-owned by a Japanese company. So do I pick the cheapest tool that works, wherever it's from? Or do I pay more for one whose data sits here?

Mei Ling Let me sharpen it. "Local" can mean three things: who built it, where the server sits, and whose law applies. Pintaz is local by builder, but its account data is in Singapore for now. The sovereign AI cloud in the Budget is still a plan. A twenty-person company can rarely get all three today. So do you pay more, or wait, for one or two of them? Or is the cheapest capable tool, with careful data habits, enough for now? Friday, the AI-YA team takes a position.

Aiman Today's Verdict is Claude Pro, Anthropic's paid chatbot plan, for an owner working through bills and costs. It's 20 US dollars a month, about RM81, or 200 dollars a year, about RM811, and tax may be added. The free plan has usage limits in five-hour and weekly windows. Pro raises them and adds the larger Opus model.

Mei Ling Free cukup, and I'd push back on paying RM81 a month for a job most owners do once a quarter.

Raj Hype, because I still print my invoices and no chatbot plan comes with someone to scan them.

Aiman Bayar, because if you work through bills and contracts every week, RM81 is less than an hour of your time. Here's one thing to do today, and it takes under half an hour. Pull out your last three electricity bills and find the units used each month, in kilowatt-hours. Multiply the highest month by 0.0798, which is the top of the forecast in ringgit. That's your worst-case monthly surcharge from December. Write that number into next quarter's budget. If you ask a chatbot to help, cover your account number and address first. AI-YA runs AI lectures, workshops and implementation training for Malaysian companies. Details at ai-ya.my/podcast.

Raj Tomorrow is work and skills. If a five-gigawatt AI build really comes to Sarawak, what jobs come with it? And what would a forty-year-old admin manager need to learn to get one?

Mei Ling If you have a view on local versus foreign apps, tell us in the comments on the episode page at podcast.ai-ya.my.

Aiman Switch off the lights nobody is using tonight, and give the evening to the people at home. Take care, and we'll ride home with you again tomorrow.