Kuok Meng Wei, whose grandfather was once called the worlds shrewdest businessman by Forbes, is leading his family into what the 41-year-old describes as the hottest industry in decades.By Jonathan Burgos, Forbes StaffThe roots of Kuok Group, the conglomerate founded by legendary business tycoon Robert Kuok, go back to 1949 in Malaysias Johor state, where he and his brothers started a business trading everyday items such as sugar, rice and flour. More than 75 years later, once-sleepy Johor, cashing in on its plentiful land and proximity to Singapore, has transformed itself into a booming tech hub. There, in a homecoming of sorts, the Kuok Group has latched on to the opportunity of selling a 21st century essential: data storage.Forbes AsiaLast October, the groups privately held unit K2 Strategic, led by the patriarchs 41-year-old grandson Kuok Meng Wei, opened a 60 megawatt (MW) data centercapacity is measured by power consumptionat the 700-acre Sedenak Tech Park, one of a dozen digital hubs multiplying across Johor. Located about 30 kilometers from the century-old causeway connect-ing Singapore and state capital Johor Bahru, it has drawn some of the biggest data center players from around the world.The data center industry is the hottest industry weve seen for decades, says Meng Wei. AI workloads are driving the demand for data centers exponentially.In Johor, K2 Strategic is currently the third-biggest operator, after Bain Capitals Bridge Data Centres, with 126MW, and DayOne (a unit of Chinas GDS) with 115MW, according to London-based property consultancy Knight Frank. Other players include Warburg Pincus-backed Princeton Digital Group and Malaysian tycoon Francis Yeohs YTL Corp., which has partnered with AI chip developer Nvidia. Meng Wei is reluctant to disclose the names of K2s existing clients, saying, We count two of the worlds largest cloud service providers and the worlds fastest-growing social media firm among our list of customers.Fast ClipFueled by the rapid migration of enterprise data onto the cloud and adoption of AI, K2 Strategics revenue has soared in the past six years.Source: K2 StrategicK2s managing director and CEO says the data center boom is similar to the large macro wave the Kuok Group rode when China opened up under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, unleashing demand for necessities like edible oil and other agri-commodities. Confident that riding this new wave will pay off, Meng Wei is doubling down with plans to invest a whopping $9 billion over the next five years on top of the $1 billion hes already spent. The bulk has been earmarked for building data center capacity in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.These countries, which are Southeast Asias fastest-growing data storage hubs, according to Knight Frank, have benefited from Singapores 2019 moratorium on building data centers due to constraints on land and electricity supply. The moratorium was lifted in 2022, but new buildouts continued in Malaysia and elsewhere as Singapore imposed more stringent requirements.The data center industry is the hottest industry weve seen for decades.Big money is pouring into the data center boom in the region. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are fast-expanding their digital footprint across Southeast Asia, with plans to invest more than a combined $44 billion in the next few years. Just over half of that amount$23 billionis targeted for Malaysia.Despite the rapid buildup, industry players are confident demand is sustainable. The industry is not overbuilding capacity just yet, says Otto Toto Sugiri, billionaire cofounder and CEO of Jakarta-listed DCI Indonesia, that countrys largest data center provider. (At the end of 2024, it operated seven centers with a combined capacity of 83MW.)Meng Wei is scaling up fast. His goal is to increase K2s capacity tenfold to 1,200MW by 2030 from 120MW currently. To achieve this, hes scouting for new sites in Malaysia outside the Sedenak campus, which he expects to be fully occupied within the next two to three years. Simultaneously, hes expanding in Indonesia where K2 Strategic has partnered with the billionaire Widjaja familys Sinar Mas Land. Theyve acquired two sites in Bekasi in eastern Jakarta, covering over 40 acres, where they plan to develop more than 100MW.K2 Strategics data center campus in Dublin.Courtesy of K2 Strategic The K in K2 Strategic doesnt stand for Kuok; the name is from the worlds second-tallest mountain, which is a steeper, more difficult climb than Everest. Its peak at 8,600 meters above sea level is where the clouds touch the ground, Meng Wei says. K2 Strategics revenue has been climbing, touching nearly $100 million in 2024 from $3 million in 2018, when it opened its first data center in Ireland, much before Southeast Asia became a data center hotspot. (The unlisted company doesnt disclose other financial numbers.)Meng Wei started his career in the agribusiness side, the Kuok Groups traditional mainstay. After earning an industrial engineering degree from Stanford University in 2007, he worked at Singapore-listed Wilmar International, the palm oil giant cofounded by Robert Kuoks nephew Kuok Khoon Hong (also a billionaire with a recent net worth of $2.8 billion). Later, as an executive director of a Wilmar subsidiary, Meng Wei shuttled between Singapore and Myanmar, where the commodities giant had invested $1 billion in a portfolio of assets, including the countrys largest sugar refinery by volume and port operations in Thilawa, a special economic zone near Yangon.In 2016, Meng Wei was tasked with setting up the Kuok Groups special projects office to explore new businesses. He suggested investing in critical infrastructurea long gestation business but one with a steady revenue stream that could provide a hedge against the cyclical nature of the groups core activities of commodities and shipping.Hot SpotThanks to the AI boom, demand for data center capacity is expected to increase rapidly in the Asia-Pacific and globally.*FORECAST | All numbers are in gigawatts (1,000 megawatts equals 1 gigawatt.) Data center capacity is measured by electricity consumption.Source: JLL That same year, after a proposed investment in a power plant in Myanmar unraveled, Meng Wei chanced upon a novel opportunity: to convert a warehouse in Dublin into a data center. It was very early days in the development of hyperscale data centers and few banks understood how to finance this asset class, recalls Meng Wei. He presented the investment proposal to his family with a compelling pitch. Data centers will provide strong returns in good times and bad times, almost like a bond, he argued.K2 Strategic spent 150 million ($153 million) to develop an 18MW center in Dublin, completing the project in 2018. The concept was so new that for the longest time my mother-in-law thought I was setting up a call center, recalls Meng Wei. Today, K2 Strategic is one of the biggest data center operators in Dublin, with operational capacity of 60MW across four centers, which have major U.S. tech companies as tenants.The foray into data centers was not an unusual move for the Kuok Group. Patriarch Robert Kuok set the stage for the groups expansion into tech over two decades ago when he invested in Epsilon Telecommunications in 2003. In an early iteration of the data center model, Epsilon provided connectivity and colocation facilities to house computer servers for customers such as banks.The industry is not overbuilding capacity just yet, says the founder and CEO of Indonesias largest data center investor.While Epsilon was eventually sold to Korea Telecom for $145 million in 2021, Meng Weis stint as a director of the company from 2016 until the sale helped him understand the business. Epsilon also provided K2 with data center expertise in the first year of its operations.Meng Weis timing has proved to be fortuitous. Data center capacity in the Asia-Pacific climbed 80% to 18 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, up from 10GW at the height of the pandemic in 2020. It will likely touch 35GW (accounting for 35% of the global total) by 2029, according to Chicago-based JLL.Data center investments are influenced by a compelling global narrative of exponential demand for computing power and data storage, constrained supply due to power scarcity, and attractive financial returns, Glen Duncan, head of Asia-Pacific data center research at JLL in Singapore, says by email.In a bid to keep up with skyrocketing demand, Meng Wei is harnessing the Kuok Groups maritime engineering capabilities to build data centers at a faster pace. In 2023, the group acquired Singapores McPEC, a builder of modular structures for offshore oil-and-gas facilities, that has since started creating lego-like modular structures similar to those installed at Sedenak, which was built in less than a year.Photographs by Munster Cheong for Forbes AsiaSuch technology speeds up the construction of data centers and they can be up and running faster than the typical two-year time frame it usually takes, Meng Wei says. The speed element is very important, confirms Fred Fitzalan Howard, associate director and data center lead at Knight Frank in Singapore. The quicker they can deliver the data center capacity, the better.According to the International Energy Agency, data centers account for around 1% of global electricity consumption, which Goldman Sachs Research estimates could rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. (In Ireland, data centers use up 20% of the electricity production.) As construction gathers pace, it causes a strain on local power networks, as is happening in Malaysia. Last July, parts of Klang Valley, outside of Kuala Lumpur experienced an outage, seven months after the countrys immigration checkpoint at the Singapore border suffered a 10-hour blackout.Meng Wei is acutely aware of the power-guzzling nature of the business. The Kuok Group, he says, plans to convert some 1,000 acres of its plantation sites in Malaysia into solar farms and other renewable energy projects, potentially building 100MW of solar-generated electricity capacity on half of the land. The sustainability angle is very strong for me, Meng Wei says. Id like to look back and tell my children what I did to make this world a better place. With reporting from Ardian Wibisono in Jakarta.FAMILY TIESForbesKuok Meng Wei belongs to the third generation of an entrepreneurial family thats made its mark in Southeast Asia and China. His grandfather Robert Kuok, a giant in business, who celebrated his 101st birthday in October, started trading commodities after World War II and expanded into logistics and hotels as well as shipping and shipbuilding.In 1997, Robert appeared on the cover of Forbes, where he was called The Worlds Shrewdest Businessman. The fortune he amassed along the way earned him the title of Malaysias richest person, a position he continues to hold. While he was often referred to as Asias sugar king, he also set up the luxury Shangri-La Hotels chain. Today, the Kuok Group has more than 100 hotels and resorts in almost 80 destinations under the Hong Kong-listed company.Robert Kuok, his siblings and a cousin, started Kuok Brothers in 1949 to trade rice, sugar and flour from a shophouse (depicted in this painting) in Johor, Malaysia.Photographs by Munster Cheong for Forbes Asia The patriarchs children have taken the helm at key companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, where Robert has been a long-time resident. His eldest son, Kuok Khoon Chen, also known as Beau, is chairman of Kuok Group. Another son, Khoon Ean, Meng Weis father, is chairman of Kuok Singapore with real estate holdings in the city-state, which also serves as the base for the groups shipping, digital infrastructure and maritime engineering businesses. Roberts youngest son, Kuok Khoon Hua, is chairman and CEO of Hong Kong-listed Kerry Properties, which owns prime office buildings in Hong Kong and mainland China, while daughter Kuok Hui Kwong is chairman of Shangri-La Group.In the third generation, Meng Weis older brother, Meng Xiong, referred to as MX, manages the family-backed private equity firm K3 Ventures, which has invested in more than 50 startups including TikTok parent ByteDance and ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab.Meng Wei says that age has not withered his grandfathers passion for business. He still keeps his energy high and stays on top of developments. After reading media reports about global companies planning data centers in Malaysia, Robert messaged his grandson: Whats going on? Give me an update. J.B.MORE FROM FORBES