VIP Guest In 2026, the winners will be businesses who treat infrastructure not simply as just a cost centre, but as a strategic enabler. Power, resilience, sovereignty, and sustainability now determine competitiveness not only for mature markets, but also for high-growth economies such as Malaysia.
2025 saw a huge shift in how the world’s perception of data centers. The sector is finally being recognised and acknowledged. For companies navigating the volatile landscape we all find ourselves in, data centers, especially colocation data centers, are no longer just a provider of space; we are an essential enabler and a strategic partner, that ensures the continuous flow of data and power that keeps the world functioning.
As we head into 2026, leaders must keep infrastructure front-of-mind. The biggest challenges ahead won’t be purely in the cloud or the code, they sit in the physical foundations that keep digital systems operational and economies running.
With that in mind, here are the five trends shaping the year ahead:
- Unlocking AI’s potential in finance starts with solving the power density challenge
For years, we’ve spoken with excitement about AI being the key to unlocking the full potential of the information age – especially in financial services. But increasingly, that same technology is becoming a bottleneck that’s stopping major financial firms from delivering.
Financial services is undoubtedly one of the industries that stands to benefit the most from its increased capabilities and gradual maturity. But the real progress in AI depends on the often overlooked, so-called ‘boring’ preparatory work: cleaning and structuring vast volumes of historical financial data – and that process requires immense, reliable power.
To deliver that effectively, customers are urgently demanding a clear roadmap to higher power density per cabinet. This is true across both established financial hubs and emerging markets like Malaysia, where banks are accelerating AI deployments but meeting power-density ceilings.
In 2026, the promise of AI in financial services is no longer just a vision. Without the right infrastructure, even the most advanced models are becoming ineffective. The industry’s ability to unlock value from large historical datasets depends on high-performance computing environments that can support modern GPU workloads. Financial firms must now prioritise power density and infrastructure upgrades not as a future ambition, but as a necessity to ensure AI delivers on its potential and drives meaningful outcomes for their customers.
- In a digital-first world, resilience is the new baseline.
Supplementary resilience or redundancy for businesses was once seen as an unnecessary expense or luxury. That mindset has now shifted as people have grown accustomed to an always-on culture where instant digital access to everything is simply expected.
Colocation data centres, such as Equinix, play a pivotal role in connectivity and providing the resilience and redundancy that help companies mitigate disruptions. For example, in e-commerce, we support global retailers by deploying infrastructure close to shoppers, which is essential for fast and reliable online transactions that reduce checkout delays and cart abandonment.
Our on-demand infrastructure and hybrid multi cloud architecture also helps online retailers handle massive spikes in traffic during high sales events, securing a seamless shopping experience even during peak periods.
The same approach is critical for Malaysia’s fast-growing gaming and esports sector C, where milliseconds can make or break the player experience. By deploying infrastructure close to players through local and regional hubs, platforms can minimise lag and deliver consistently responsive gameplay across major launches or live tournaments.
As digital infrastructure becomes more important for businesses, rules and regulations are changing to make sure this infrastructure is strong and reliable. Regulators and industry bodies are placing greater emphasis on operational resilience, especially in sectors like financial services, while customers now view downtime as unacceptible. In Malaysia, Bank Negara’s RMIT and updated Business Continuity Management guidelines have effectively formalised operational resilience requirements for the financial sector — making strong, reliable digital infrastructure not just a technical need, but a regulatory expectation. Beyond financial services, Malaysia’s Cyber Security Bill and Digital Economy Blueprint signal a broader push for businesses to strengthen uptime, connectivity and cyber preparedness across the board.
Infrastructure is now a critical utility. In 2026, we must demonstrate that resilience is the floor, not the ceiling, and it is the only way to safeguard brand reputation in an instant, digitally driven economy.
- Sovereign data demands a global ecosystem
The paradox facing the Life Sciences sector defines the complexity of modern data: how do you keep sensitive data local while gaining global insight?
Personalised medicine requires Real World Data (RWD) sourced from across the globe to be effective. But this highly sensitive information must be protected locally. This has fuelled the rise of sovereign AI initiatives.
In areas like drug discovery and clinical trials, access to in-country, patient-identifiable data enables researchers to work with richer datasets, leading to more accurate insights and predictions. However, when data must be anonymised due to cross-border restrictions, the loss of granularity can reduce the effectiveness of outcomes.
Countries worldwide, including Malaysia with its strengthening data-protection standards are prioritising soveriegnty while still pursuing global research outcomes.
Equinix helps overcome these data-sharing limitations. Through our global platform and interconnection capabilities, we help healthcare and life science organisations establish infrastructure in-country, enabling them to access and process sensitive data, locally. This protects global research operations while maintaining compliance with data sovereignty laws.
Additionally, Equinix offers private, secure deployments that ensure data remains within the required jurisdiction, minimising the risk of unauthorised access or regulatory breaches. Our ability to connect ecosystems across geographies, without moving the data, empowers healthcare innovators to collaborate globally while keeping data local.
In practice, this interconnecting of compute environments dramatically reduces how long it takes pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop new medicines. What used to take 10 to 14 years and billions of dollars can now be shortened by months, even years.
The winning strategy for 2026 will be a resilient hybrid model that facilitates global data learning while preserving local data sovereignty. The integrity of these global-local data ecosystems can be the difference between a new cure and a delayed project.
- The next wave of AI is agentic
The focus of the next wave of AI is already shifting, and we will see the importance of AI inference as companies seek to capitalise on their AI investments with end users. This means moving beyond solely investing in massive training clusters, which is why we’ve recently introduced our Distributed AI Infrastructure to the market.
The future isn’t just about massive processing; it’s about real-time action and transactions.
Within Equinix, the belief is that the next big wave will be Agentic AI – intelligence empowered to take real action, not just generate and mimic content. This shift will rapidly power up the inference of conversation, moving workloads from giant central clusters to real-time models closer to the point of use.
Across APAC, and especially in Malaysia, governments and enterprises are rapidly piloting AI applications in areas such as smart city management, intelligent traffic control, flood and disaster prediction, and financial fraud detection. These are national priorities under Malaysia’s Digital Economy Blueprint and upcoming AI governance frameworks—domains where real-time inference is essential to protect citizens, keep services running reliably, and improve public-sector efficiency.
This links directly to the AI knowledge gap we recently commissioned research on: the public is confident in AI, yet few people realise how often they use it daily. Closing the gap matters because only when people understand how AI is already being used, can we begin to explore the different ways it can be used to innovate and drive progress.
As intelligence becomes more distributed and embedded across the edge of the network, its use becomes practically invisible, an expected utility, like electricity or water. Any provider not helping customers bridge this gap between their capacity needs – and the emerging edge – will risk becoming irrelevant.
Looking further ahead, quantum computing will be the next step after AI if its full potential is realised. This emerging technology is attracting substantial public and private investment, with companies ranging from those in research mode and testing with end users, to those already looking to scale.
- Malaysia’s leadership will be defined by sustainability
2025 highlighted a critical shift in Malaysia: sustainability is no longer a “good-to-have” and it is fast becoming a strategic imperative for businesses and digital infrastructure operators alike. This is being driven by a combination of national policy, market expectations, and operational realities on the ground.
Malaysia’s commitment to energy efficiency, decarbonisation, and climate-resilient infrastructure is accelerating through initiatives such as the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR), the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the Green Electricity Tariff (GET) programme, and the government’s push for greener data centres. At the same time, investors and enterprises increasingly reward organisations that demonstrate credible, transparent ESG roadmaps, while rising energy costs and climate risks make efficient, resilient infrastructure a business necessity.
For data centre operators and large digital-led businesses, this means designing for energy efficiency from day one, increasing the use of renewable and low-carbon energy sources, and embedding flood- and heat-resilient architecture into facilities. Leading companies in Malaysia are already treating sustainability as a strategic differentiator and not just to meet compliance requirements, but to strengthen operational continuity, unlock ESG value, and build long-term competitiveness in a rapidly greening economy.
As Malaysia moves into 2026, success will hinge on deploying infrastructure strategies that are sustainable, resilient, and globally connected, enabling organisations to meet evolving local regulations, deliver against ESG targets, and thrive within an increasingly digital and climate-conscious market landscape.
This article is contributed by Cheam Tat Inn, Managing Director, Malaysia, Equinix