By Eduardo Baptista, Ashley Tang and Jun Yuan Yong

BEIJING/KUALA LUMPUR/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Malaysia, a hotspot for data centres, is reining in the pace of expansion in a move industry insiders and analysts expect will hinder China’s efforts to gain access to powerful chips that are crucial to improving its artificial intelligence capabilities.

The Southeast Asian country has drawn in data centre investments from U.S. technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Huawei and Alibaba in recent years, spurred by cheap land and electricity costs and robust local AI demand prospects.

More than two-thirds of data centre capacity under construction in Southeast Asia’s five main growth markets has been committed in Malaysia, according to da

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