Malaysia launches 60,000 engineer training program: striving to become a chip center

On May 29, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar recently announced the National Semiconductor Industry Strategy (NSS). This ambitious plan aims to attract at least 500 billion ringgit (equivalent to about 106.45 billion US dollars) of investment, covering key areas such as chip design, advanced packaging and manufacturing equipment.

At the core of the strategy, Malaysia plans to vigorously train and upgrade the skills of local high-tech engineers, with the goal of cultivating and expanding a team of 60,000 professionals to shape the country into a research and development hub for the global semiconductor industry.

When talking about the rapid development of technology, Prime Minister Anwar cited a series of eye-catching data. It took Netflix three and a half years to accumulate one million users, while Facebook took only 10 months and Instagram took only two and a half months. Most notably, ChatGPT achieved this goal in just five days.

Anwar believes that this fully illustrates the rapid and unpredictable nature of technological development. Therefore, Malaysia must strengthen its foundation and improve its adaptability to cope with various environments and situations.

In addition, Anwar also saw the growing trend of the global electric vehicle market and pointed out that Malaysia has great potential in this field.

He said Malaysia is expected to become a key supply hub for electric vehicle power chips as power chips play a vital role in energy transformation and decarbonization technology.