BUSINESSES today need to build geo-economic bridges to counter the ongoing geopolitical volatilities, said Malaysian billionaire tycoon Francis Yeoh on Wednesday (Mar 6).

Speaking at UOB’s inaugural Privilege Conversation Asean event in Singapore, the executive chairman of infrastructure developer YTL Group stressed the need for companies to continue investing in both physical and digital infrastructure to facilitate business flows.

“Politics will have to move to economic realities,” he said during a fireside chat. And with greater business exchanges between countries and parties, political tensions will have to tone down, he added.

On its part, YTL is ramping up its investment in infrastructure to capitalise on Asean’s artificial intelligence (AI) and data boom.

The 69-year-old Yeoh noted that despite having over 90 per cent of its businesses in Singapore, the UK and Australia, the group is building a 500-megawatt (MW) green data centre park in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor.

This facility is partially powered by a solar farm located on an adjoining plot. The first phase, with up to 72MW of capacity, is expected to go be in service this year.

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Last December, YTL reached a US$4.3 billion investment deal with graphics chip maker Nvidia for the development of an AI centre to be housed in the same Johor park.

Yeoh told the audience that he was not too bothered by the potential downsides of an AI boom, such as job displacement and ethical issues.

“Anytime a new technology or development emerges in history, it is neutral. The question is how you apply the new technology,” he said.

Expressing a different view on this was Singapore’s former foreign affairs minister George Yeo, who spoke during an earlier session at the same event.

“Every technology is capable of good and evil, but it often starts off evil as it will take longer for people’s moral sense to catch up (with technological developments),” said Yeo.

Growth prospects

Contrary to many people’s perception of YTL being a conglomerate, Yeoh clarified that the business focuses exclusively on infrastructure – be it hard infrastructure like construction and land development, or soft infrastructure such as telecommunications and data centres.

On the whole, Yeoh expressed confidence about the growth prospects of the infrastructure business, especially within South-east Asia.

“There remains a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built – the high-speed trains, as one example, has not been built yet. And on the digital side, the industry has only just started,” he said.

More than 500 clients from UOB’s privilege banking division across Asean attended the half-day event at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre.