INNOVATION WITHOUT BORDERS

Hossein Fateh
Founder & CEO, Cloud Capital and CloudHQ

Ongoing data centre expansion will help support future products.

Exponential data centre growth is constrained by power availability. Data demand is rising faster than hardware efficiency, creating an insatiable need for power-intensive data centres. The limiting factor today is not technology but electricity supply. Applications like AI training and AI inference will demand more computing load that will drive further infrastructure growth.

Expansion and faster internet speed coincide with ability to develop bigger applications. Faster internet speeds have enabled entirely new applications, from search and streaming to AI and autonomous vehicles. Each leap in connectivity has spurred larger data needs, which necessitate larger data centre facilities.

Locally built data centres are essential. Data localisation is essential because it belongs to local customers and is not the data of foreign firms. Many applications depend on ultra-low latency, requiring data centres to be close to users for security and responsiveness.

Dr. Kong Xin Ying
Lee Kuan Yew Research Fellow, Nanyang Technological University Singapore

Innovative catalyst transforms plastics and biomass into high-value chemicals

Traditional plastic recycling has numerous issues limiting its application. Conventional methods like pyrolysis and mechanical recycling are energy-intensive, expensive, toxic, and limited to certain clean plastics. They emit poisonous gases and produce low-value hydrocarbons while failing to process mixed or contaminated waste. Thus, only 9% of global plastic has ever been recycled.

A non-metal, non-toxic and cost-effective catalyst will not merely recycle but upcycle plastics. Dr Kong’s breakthrough photocatalytic method decomposes plastics within one day under room temperature and atmospheric pressure using only light, oxygen, and a non-metal catalyst.

This technology can be applied to other types of waste. The same catalyst can depolymerize even biomass, nitrile gloves and hospital thermoplastic shells, serving industries from pharmaceuticals to clean energy.

Koh Cha-Ly
Founder & CEO, Urbanmetry Sdn Bhd

Urbanmetry’s data-driven approach enables smarter, demand-led city and transport planning.

There are too many known unknowns with urban data. Reliable data on population growth, income, and supply trends is scarce. Therefore, local urban planners and developers often rely on gut instinct from personal experiences, but that approach is not scalable when operating across multiple regions.

Urbanmetry helps property developers identify high-potential areas. The company analyses migration patterns, population movements, and consumption data to show how people move and live, shifting decisions based on intuition to evidence. Their data also supports banks and city planners with predictive models that back-test accurately against real-world transactions.

Urbanmetry’s solutions enable better public transport planning. Their model tracks user movement to simulate bus routes and predict ridership before implementation. This allows a “demand-led design” rather than Malaysia’s traditional “build and hope they come” approach. By quantifying uncertainty, cities can be built to move people more efficiently.

Hugh Campbell
Co-Founder & Partner, Bullhound Capital

Southeast Asia (SEA) can learn from Europe’s entrepreneurial development.

SEA shares similarities with Europe but also advantageous differences. Both regions share complex, multilingual and multi-country markets. While Europe is challenged by low growth and ageing demographics, Southeast Asia’s dynamic, youthful workforce and 700 million-strong digital population offer an advantage.

SEA needs to address the last three stages of the sustainable innovation ecosystem. While early-stage funding is strong, Southeast Asia still lacks growth capital, exit pathways, and experienced entrepreneurs who can recycle wealth and knowledge. Without domestic growth capital, founders grow slowly, go bankrupt, or sell too early. These gaps mirror Europe’s past and must be ended to sustain innovation momentum.

Nurturing future unicorns needs collaborations in building the business ecosystem. Innovation demands tolerance for failure and acceptance of risk. With coordination and patience between universities, corporates, governments, and politicians, Malaysia could become a regional innovation hub linking Europe and Asia.

Quotes

Moore’s Law dictates that processing power will increase every two years [but] the demand that society is putting on data centre servers is actually growing at a pace much faster than Moore’s Law.
– Hossein Fateh

Instead of producing recycled plastics, we break the polymers back to their monomers. We view this technology as a plastic upcycling instead of plastic recycling because we add value to the products.
– Dr. Kong Xin Ying

Malaysians have been doing supply-led design for many years but technology has enabled demand-led design. Using our destination heat map, powered by mobile data that we track, we built a model that helps predict [bus] ridership before [city planners] even put up a bus.
– Koh Cha-Ly

It takes an ecosystem to build a unicorn. It requires collaboration between the best universities, the largest corporates, the most ambitious governments and politicians to bring about significant change that will allow these entrepreneurs to be more successful on the global stage.
– Hugh Campbell