PICTURE this. Somewhere in Ohio, on a patch of land that used to enrich uranium – yes, actual nuclear material – a company called OpenAI is trying to lease a data centre so enormous that Nvidia is reportedly willing to guarantee $250 billion just to make it happen.
Two hundred and fifty billion US dollars. At today’s exchange rate, that’s a little over RM1 trillion – roughly a thousand billion ringgit, spent so a computer can think harder.
For context, that’s more than double Malaysia’s entire annual federal budget, committed to backstop one company’s electricity bill.
Meanwhile, on that very same weekend, over in China, a company called Moonshot AI did the exact opposite.
They took their newest AI – one of the biggest, smartest ever built, 2.8 trillion digital “neurons” strong – and just… put it online.
For free.
Anyone with a decent computer setup can download the whole brain and take it home.
No subscription.
No permission slip.
No “please enter your credit card details”.
Same week. Same industry.
Two completely different personalities.
One says, “Guard the treasure and spend a trillion ringgit doing it.” The other says, “Here, have the treasure, we don’t even want your bank details.”
And weirdly, this is a Kuching story, not just a Silicon Valley one.
The wheel always turns
There’s an old Daoist idea – fù (復) – that things return. Nothing stays locked up forever; eventually the gate swings back open.
For a few years now, the smartest AI in the world has felt like a members-only club, and Sarawak was never really on the guest list.
You paid what the club charged, in whatever currency they set, on whatever terms they liked, and you said thank you.
Kimi K3 – that’s the name of the free one – just walked up and kicked the door off its hinges.
It’s not necessarily the single smartest AI on the planet; the top-tier proprietary models still edge it out on some tasks. But it doesn’t need to be the smartest.
It just needs to be yours – no landlord, no monthly rent, no one on the other side of the world deciding tomorrow that you can no longer use it, or that it now costs three times as much.
Think of it less like buying a car and more like being handed the blueprints to build one. You might not build it as polished as the factory version. But nobody can ever repossess it.
Okay but what does this actually mean for me?
Fair question. Let’s skip the jargon and talk in terms an actual Kuching business owner, teacher, or student would recognise.
It could get cheaper to use AI for your business. Right now, a lot of small businesses across Sarawak are paying monthly subscription fees to overseas companies just to get basic AI help – replying to customers, drafting quotations, translating documents for a Chinese or Indonesian client.
Those fees are usually billed in US dollars, which means every ringgit you spend is quietly taxed twice: once by the subscription price, and once by whatever the exchange rate is doing that month.
An open model that anyone can run themselves doesn’t eliminate cost entirely – servers and expertise still cost money – but it breaks the “pay forever, in foreign currency, or lose access” model that’s dominated the last three years.
Your data doesn’t have to leave the state, or the country. If you run the AI yourself instead of sending every customer message to a server sitting somewhere in Virginia or Singapore, your business records, your client’s personal details, your sensitive documents – all of it can stay right here, on a machine you control.
That matters more than most people realise, especially if you’re in legal work, healthcare, or anything government-adjacent where data residency isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s the law.
Someone could finally teach AI proper Sarawak Malay – or Iban. This is the quiet, unglamorous part of the story that actually matters most long-term.
Free, open models can be retrained and fine-tuned by anyone with the skill and the patience.
That means, for the first time, the tools genuinely exist to build an AI that understands Sarawak Malay properly, that doesn’t flatten Iban into broken Bahasa Indonesia, that could one day help preserve dialects – like Iban Vaie, which is quietly disappearing because fewer and people speak it.
Big US and Chinese labs were never going to prioritise that. Now, in theory, a small, determined team in Kuching could.
The trillion-ringgit superbrain isn’t really for us anyway. Let’s be honest about what that Ohio data centre is actually for.
It’s being built to serve the biggest, richest customers on Earth – governments, multinational corporations, companies burning through compute at a scale no Sarawak SME will ever need or afford.
It was never going to be priced for a shop in Sibu or a tuition centre in Kuching. The open, free track isn’t the consolation prize here – it’s the one actually built for a business your size, whether it means to be or not.
The Practice
Don’t chase the biggest, shiniest AI this week. Chase the free one.
If you run a business – even a small one – ask whoever handles your tech, or a capable freelancer, one simple question: “Can we run one of these open AI models ourselves, instead of paying rent on someone else’s brain?”
For a growing list of everyday tasks – replying to customers, drafting documents, translating between languages, organising records – the honest answer this year, for the first time, is: probably yes.
It won’t be perfect. It’ll take a bit of setup, a bit of trial and error, maybe a phone call to someone who actually knows servers.
You might need to rope in a younger cousin, a polytechnic student, or that one friend who’s always fiddling with computers.
That’s fine – every useful tool in history started out slightly inconvenient before someone figured out the shortcuts.
And if you’re a parent reading this over breakfast, here’s the version worth saying out loud at the table: for the first time, “the best AI in the world” and “the AI you can actually afford” are no longer two different sentences.
That’s worth explaining to a teenager who assumes every powerful tool comes with a price tag attached – it teaches a quieter lesson too, that access isn’t always bought, sometimes it’s simply given, and what you do with it afterward is entirely up to you.
But the gate has swung open, whether Sarawak walks through it or not.
A trillion-parameter brain just got handed out for free while a trillion-ringgit one is being built to keep everyone else out.
The only real question left is who in Sarawak picks up the free one first – and what they choose to teach it.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
