Google plans $15 billion Malaysia investment as shareholder suit alleges AI-training violations

Google says its US$15 billion investment is planned across 2027 and 2028, building on its more than 15-year presence in Malaysia and a 2024 digital-infrastructure investment announcement.[1] Its plan includes new data center campuses in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, while its first campus at Elmina Business Park in Selangor is already operational.[1] Google describes its approach as an integrated plan for energy-efficient data center campuses in industrial zones.[1] The company says more than 80 Malaysian entities are involved in developing and operating its infrastructure in the country.[1]

Google says the infrastructure will support services including Search, Maps and Chrome for people and organizations in Malaysia and Asia-Pacific.[1] It also says computing capacity in Selangor will support its upcoming Google Cloud region in Malaysia for enterprise customers.[1] The company says the plan will add more than 1 gigawatt of clean-energy capacity to Malaysia’s National Grid and bolster local water security.[1] Google expects construction in 2027 and 2028 to support more than 37,000 local jobs annually, and projects its operating facilities will sustain more than 9,000 local jobs each year.[1] It announced four programs intended to upskill 800,000 Malaysians over five years, from 2027 to 2031.[1]

Google estimates construction will contribute an average of US$1.1 billion to Malaysia’s GDP annually and generate US$378 million in average annual labor income.[1] It estimates approximately 6,000 construction-related jobs will be in construction.[1] For the operational phase, Google says wages for the jobs its facilities sustain will average 45% above Malaysia’s national median.[1] These are company estimates and projections, not reported outcomes. Google’s account also describes a US$2 billion investment in Elmina Business Park, Selangor.[2]

Shareholder Phil Rosen filed a complaint on October 30 in federal court in Chicago, naming Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and 10 other directors and executives.[3] The complaint alleges that recordings, compositions and lyrics were used to train Google’s Lyria music models.[3] It also alleges Google built voice products such as Gemini Live using hundreds of thousands of hours of speech recordings without consent required by Illinois’ biometric privacy law.[3] Separately, the complaint says MusicLM was trained on five million audio clips totaling 280,000 hours of music.[3] The filing does not specify a damages figure; any damages recovered in the derivative suit would go to Alphabet rather than Rosen.[3]