- Semarak AI Malaysia matches Google’s 2025 Gemini offer to 445,000 officers
- Gobind has said Google is not the civil service’s de facto AI suite
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing to put its Amazon Quick AI tool in the hands of up to 445,000 Malaysian government officers under Semarak AI Malaysia. Google’s Gemini tools were offered to the same number of public officers in February 2025.
AWS launched the national programme at AWS Cloud and AI Day Kuala Lumpur on 4 November. Quick, which AWS describes as “the AI built for work”, will be delivered through the AI-as-a-Service platform run by Jabatan Digital Negara (JDN). AWS said officers could use it for tasks such as analysing procurement data and pulling together policy research from different agencies.
The Ministry of Digital and Google Cloud launched AI at Work 2.0 in February 2025. It gave up to 445,000 public officers access to Google Workspace with Gemini, which includes AI in apps such as Gmail and Docs. Before that rollout, the ministry ran a pilot with 270 officers. In the pilot, 97% of participants saved an average of 3.25 hours a week, Digital News Asia reported at the time.
Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo said at the time that Google AI was not the de facto AI suite for the civil service, according to SoyaCincau.
“We are very inclusive. So, those who have modules and programs that they want to offer, we look at them,” he said.
AWS did not say whether Quick will run alongside Gemini in government offices, or whether officers’ access comes at a cost to the government. It describes 445,000 as an upper limit and did not say how many officers are using Quick today.
Kiro for government developers
GovTech Malaysia, under the Ministry of Digital, is also launching GovHub, powered by Kiro, AWS’s AI engineering agent, through the same JDN platform. The first phase is a pilot with 500 developers in 2026, and GovTech aims to onboard 4,000 by 2028.
Kiro uses what AWS calls spec-driven development: it turns a developer’s prompt into structured requirements and a design before it writes code. AWS says this helps developers get what they want in fewer attempts.
AWS said Semarak AI Malaysia builds on its RM29.2 billion (US$6.2 billion) commitment to invest in Malaysia through 2037. That commitment is linked to its Kuala Lumpur cloud region, which opened in August 2024.
Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani, one of the event’s keynote speakers, tied the programme to building local AI capability.
“For Malaysia to lead in the regional AI economy, we need a workforce and a software industry that can build, not just consume, AI technology,” he said, according to AWS.
Semarak AI Malaysia beyond the public sector
AWS said Malaysian software companies building on its cloud grew their cloud and AI workloads by about 30% on average between 2024 and 2025. That figure comes from AWS.
In Sarawak, more than 20 software companies have graduated from the pilot cohort of the Sarawak SaaS Accelerator (SaSAR), which AWS runs with the Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation (SDEC). Graduates received AWS cloud credits and mentoring, and SDEC matches them with Sarawak businesses looking to adopt AI.
AWS is also working with GD XCHANGE, the solutions arm of last-mile logistics provider GDEX, and with AWS distributor VSTECS to bring Quick and Kiro to SMEs that GDEX already serves. Eligible SMEs first go through an AI readiness assessment and then get six months of free access to both tools. The partners aim to onboard 10,000 SMEs by 2028.
On skills, more than 3,000 polytechnic and community college students and lecturers set a Malaysia Book of Records mark for the largest participation in an agentic AI competition, the POLYCC Agentic AI League 2026, which used Kiro as its main coding tool.
Hussein Mohd Ali, AWS’s country manager for Malaysia, said the programme is designed to have the public sector lead the way in building with AI.
“When the public sector leads in building with AI, it becomes the lighthouse for the rest of the country,” he said.
