Selangor teams up with Google Cloud on AI

Malaysia’s Selangor state government has teamed up with Google Cloud to help local government agencies build artificial intelligence (AI) applications aimed at improving public services in areas such as education and healthcare, as well as advancing projects that boost tourism and agricultural output.

Dubbed Teraju AI Selangor, the initiative, funded by the state government and spearheaded by the Selangor Technical Skills Development Centre (STDC), will provide participating agencies with an AI innovation sandbox and access to Google Cloud’s AI technology stack for up to six weeks.

The AI technology stack includes fully managed, AI-optimised infrastructure powered by Google Cloud tensor processing units (TPUs) and Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), offering an efficient and cost-effective way to train complex AI models.

Agencies can also tap Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform to access over 160 pre-trained AI models, including Google’s Gemini 2.0, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama. The models can be customised and integrated into AI applications, even without extensive programming expertise.

Furthermore, BigQuery, a unified data management and analytics platform, will help with organising and governing multimodal data used for training AI models. Finally, Gemini Code Assist, an AI-powered coding tool, provides developers with personalised suggestions and guidance, speeding up application development.

Officiating the launch of the initiative, Selangor’s chief minister, Amirudin Bin Shari, said Teraju AI Selangor will focus on equipping agencies with the necessary tools and training to harness AI responsibly and ethically, prioritising data privacy and security amid growing cyber threats. He also expressed his hope that the initiative would pave the way for a more responsive and modern government, rivalling the best in Asia.

To maximise the benefits of the sandbox, participating agencies will receive hands-on training in a full-day workshop sponsored and conducted by STDC and Google Cloud. The workshop will equip AI practitioners and developers with the skills to identify use cases and build AI prototypes.

Over the following six weeks, agencies will refine their prototypes with ongoing support from STDC, Google Cloud and Cloud Space, a Google Cloud partner. The programme will culminate in a demonstration of working prototypes to a panel of experts from the Selangor state government, STDC, and Google Cloud. The panel will assess the functionality and implementation readiness of each prototype.

The most promising prototypes, judged on their potential to benefit Selangor’s citizens and economy, will be showcased at the Teraju AI Selangor graduation ceremony later this year. Further funding from the state government may be allocated to facilitate their full-scale implementation.

Serene Sia, country director for Malaysia and Singapore at Google Cloud, said Selangor is poised to benefit from Google’s investments in Malaysia, including the construction of a datacentre and cloud region in Elmina Business Park.

She also reiterated Google Cloud’s commitment to supporting Selangor’s state priorities, such as Rancangan Selangor, the state’s development blueprint, by working directly with state agencies and STDC to identify specific areas where AI can be applied to uplift productivity, enhance decision-making and deliver impactful services. 

Teraju AI Selangor comes on the heels of an earlier move by Malaysia’s federal government to equip 445,000 public officers with generative AI tools through the AI at Work 2.0 programme. Initiated by the Ministry of Digital’s National AI Office and Google Cloud, the programme provides access to the advanced capabilities of Google Workspace with Gemini in a bid to improve delivery of public services and free up civil servants to focus on more strategic tasks.