• One AI cluster, 5,592 fibres: Panduit’s read on Malaysia’s AI data centre boom.
• Its pitch covers fibre and power; on cooling, the other big constraint, it feeds the controls rather than fixes the heat.

Malaysia’s AI data centre boom is sold on Nvidia chips and gigawatt headlines. Panduit sells what sits underneath: the fibre and power that move data between the chips, which the company argues will decide how well any of it actually runs. The scale is easy to miss. A single AI cluster needs 5,592 fibre-optic connections, and one data centre hall in Johor holds 350 of them.

That anatomy came from Kevin Choong, senior business manager for network infrastructure in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia at Panduit, a US cabling and network infrastructure firm that has sold in Malaysia for more than 25 years. He walked reporters through it at the company’s Technology Day in Kuala Lumpur. One hall is a single build phase, and it draws about 150 megawatts of equipment load before any customer workload begins.

Panduit wants that hidden layer taken seriously. Simin Sirun, Panduit’s business director for ASEAN, India and Korea, made the point repeatedly through the session. “A lot of people only know the front end and the application. They don’t know the back end, which is always the most critical,” he told reporters during the media briefing. “Without the back end, the whole thing will not work, even the software.”

The back end he means is passive infrastructure, the industry’s term for the cabling, connectors and power distribution that move data and current between active equipment like servers and GPUs. It draws none of the attention that Nvidia’s chips command, and Panduit’s argument is that it sets the ceiling on what those chips can actually do.

Almost all of that build is now AI. Choong estimated that close to 100% of the data centres going up in Johor Bahru are meant for AI, which follows from a market where the state’s earlier freeze on conventional data centre approvals has left AI capacity as most of what still gets built. He expects the AI share of Panduit’s data centre work to grow “by a multiplier of two to four times” over the next two to three years. 

Data centres already make up 50 to 55% of the company’s Malaysian business, he said, with the balance coming from manufacturing and commercial sites from Penang to the Klang Valley.

Complement, not compete

The boom has pulled the big electrical vendors toward the same sites, and the first differentiation question Panduit fielded was how its power products stand apart from Schneider Electric and other players alike, which sell into these facilities too. Choong declined the rivalry framing. The products “complement” each other, he said, because vendors like Schneider are the power professionals in the low-voltage space while Panduit sits in the network cabling layer. 

The intelligent power distribution unit, a rack-level device that feeds and monitors power to servers, is the one area where the two overlap, and the brand a customer chooses there tends to track the contract and the site’s preference rather than any head-to-head contest.

What the AI data centre pitch leaves out

The complement argument has a limit, and Choong was unusually direct about it. Cooling is one of the two pain points Panduit names alongside power density, yet the company does little of the actual work. “In terms of integration, I think it’s pretty minimal,” he said when asked what the company is doing, addressing the power-hungry need of the infrastructure it builds for. Panduit’s contribution is the data connections that feed a site’s monitoring and automation systems, not the thermal engineering that stops high-density AI racks from overheating. That harder problem belongs to the cooling specialists, and Panduit’s role is to wire up their controls.

Asked about accounts of data centres buckling under AI demand, Choong pushed back on the popular version. Overheating, he said, tends to come from non-compliant products rather than the volume of prompts hitting a site. Earlier in the session, Ethan Liang, Panduit’s business manager for ASEAN electrical infrastructure, had played a video of a cable cleat, the clamp that holds power cabling in place, containing a short circuit on a compliant install while a non-compliant one blew apart.

The bottleneck upstream

The constraint Panduit watches most closely sits further up the chain. Sirun pointed to a worldwide shortage of the high-grade glass used to draw optical fibre, squeezed by AI buildouts running at once in the United States and China. “The whole industry just went crazy,” he said. 

Panduit’s response is to hold its own inventory rather than depend on third parties, keeping stock in regional warehouses including Singapore and China, and to buy glass early on projects it has already scoped with customers so it locks in both supply and price. Its Malaysian distributor is sitting on unusually high inventory to cover the surge.

Panduit’s footprint in the country predates the cycle now reshaping it. Alongside its long-standing sales presence, the company runs about 45 accredited installation partners and backs certified sites with a 25-year system warranty. Its manufacturing has shifted closer to the demand: a Johor plant that replaced a former Singapore facility now employs around 200 people, though Sirun could not give its size or output share when asked.

For all the detail about AI architectures, Choong said the daily pressure has narrowed to a single demand. Customers want speed above all. “How fast is your lead time?” he said. “Price secondary.”

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