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Short abstract

With a knowledge co-creation approach, we empirically observe the technopolitics of Malaysian bureaucrats operationalising their government's path towards an 'AI-nation'; negotiating contradictions between sovereignty, democracy, and Big Tech's infrastructural AI assemblages in local government.

Long abstract

Against the backdrop of the global expansion of data centre infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), Malaysia's government announced its ambition to become a so-called 'AI-nation' by 2030. Couched in a narrative of billion-dollar direct investments by Big Tech companies for the country to become 'Southeast Asia's data centre’, AI has become central to imagining Malaysia's future – and its position in delicate regional geopolitics marked by the chip wars.

While deploying AI into all aspects of Malaysian government activity is presented as ‘without alternative’, the details of this transformation are left undefined. The work of stitching together the government’s AI future with more mundane practices, infrastructures, and public service systems is thus mostly left to bureaucrats.

This paper empirically examines the technopolitics of governmental AI through these bureaucrats’ work of making Malaysia’s government fit into a global infrastructural AI assemblage. Based on a knowledge co-creation approach with selected ministries, we observe them assembling partially coherent rationales for AI applications; glossing over contradictions between sovereignty, democracy, and Big Tech solutions; negotiating and resisting the risks of governing with AI.

We then argue that this mundane work of operationalising AI into the everyday functions of state institutions is far from mundane: It is where a global infrastructural AI assemblage territorialises novel forms of government, subjectivities, and exclusions; and it is where localised infrastructures enact geopolitics. Studying and reflecting these practices in the majority world thus holds the potential to not only nuance, but re-imagine, decolonise, or resist Western imaginaries of AI futures.