On April 14, at University of Nottingham Malaysia’s campus in Semenyih, science, technology and innovation minister Chang Lih Kang launched National Science Week 2026 with a warning that should jolt awake every policymaker in Putrajaya.

“We need to build technological sovereignty so that we are not constrained by any party in such conditions,” he said, referring to global geopolitical tensions that are creating uncertainty and instability.

“We don’t just want to produce users of technology, we must produce creators of technology,” he added.

He is right, and he is saying it at precisely the right moment.

The uncomfortable truth is that for four decades, Malaysia has been a technology consumer dressed up as a technology nation.

We assemble other people’s chips in Penang, host their data centres in Johor and run their cloud software in our banks. When a foreign government decides to turn off a tap, we have almost no leverage.

But here is what usually gets lost. Malaysia is not starting from zero. Not even close.

Consider the National Semiconductor Strategy, which Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim unveiled in May 2024. It targets RM500 billion in Phase 1 investments, backed by RM25 billion in fiscal support, with the explicit goal of moving us up the value chain from assembly and test into integrated circuit design, advanced packaging and wafer fabrication.

It also commits to training 60,000 high-skilled engineers, the one resource any serious chip programme cannot substitute.

Next, consider our sovereign digital rails.

DuitNow, operated by PayNet, now processes around 13 million transactions daily across nearly 3 million merchant touchpoints. That is a homegrown payments rail no foreign company can switch off.

The National Artificial Intelligence Office, launched in December 2024 with an RM18.1 million allocation under Budget 2026, is drafting the National AI Action Plan 2026 to 2030.

Then there is MIMOS Berhad, our national applied research centre, which has run a 200mm wafer fabrication line for over two decades and designed Malaysia’s first local microprocessor, the 16-bit Pesona, in 1997. It is not TSMC. But it is a real, Malaysian-owned capability which most developing countries lack.

None of this is cosmetic. These are the load-bearing pillars of a sovereign digital economy, and we are roughly seven years into a build that took India fifteen. The question now is how we build the skyscraper.

The historical playbook is remarkably consistent.

Taiwan, in the 1970s, was a poor agricultural economy with no chip industry. Its government set up the Industrial Technology Research Institute in 1973. Then in 1987, it used its National Development Fund to take a 48% founding stake in a new company called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, backed by technology transfer from Philips and capital from wealthy local families.

TSMC today produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips.

South Korea did something even more audacious. Park Chung-hee’s Heavy and Chemical Industry drive in the 1970s channelled enormous state credit into chemicals, electronics, metals and machinery. That policy, brutally executed, gave the world Samsung, Hyundai and SK Hynix.

South Korea now spends over 5% of gross domestic product on research and development. Malaysia spends roughly 1%.

India took yet another route. Rather than out-manufacture China or out-design the Americans, it built a sovereign digital layer. Aadhaar gave 1.3 billion Indians a verifiable identity, and Unified Payments Interface, better known as UPI, turned every smartphone into a bank account.

A December 2025 Boston Consulting Group report found that Aadhaar-linked digital payments cut welfare leakage by 12.7% and save the Indian government up to RM39.5 billion every year.

Three countries, three approaches, one shared insight. Tech sovereignty is not built by accident. It is built by government choosing a few domains, committing serious capital for decades and refusing to be distracted.

So what should Malaysia’s version look like? Three priorities, with rough timelines. First, between now and 2028, finish the foundations. Hit the 2.5% of gross domestic product target on research and development spending that minister Chang has already championed.

Complete the National AI Action Plan 2026 to 2030 and give it real statutory teeth, not the toothless guideline treatment that has killed so many of our previous blueprints. Expand MIMOS’s wafer fab capacity and open it up as shared national infrastructure for Malaysian startups.

Second, between 2028 and 2032, pick our lanes and double down. Malaysia cannot be sovereign in everything. But we can be sovereign in three or four niches where we already have credible starting positions: advanced semiconductor packaging, halal-certified biotechnology, and tropical climate technology.

Channel New Industrial Master Plan 2030 funding into the ten Malaysian chip firms the National Semiconductor Strategy has promised to build, each targeting RM4.7 billion in annual revenue. Back two research universities with sustained funding to compete with Tsinghua and the National University of Singapore.

Third, between 2032 and 2040, own our stack. A sovereign Malaysia should be able to fabricate its own mid-node chips, train its own large language models in Bahasa Malaysia and every other local language, and run its critical government and banking systems on code that is either Malaysian-written or Malaysian-auditable. Hit the 3.5% research and development target by 2030. Push for 5% by 2045.

None of this is cheap. None of it is fast. And none of it is possible without the political courage to tell voters that tech sovereignty is a thirty-year project, not a five-year election slogan.

The alternative is worse. As Chang put it in Semenyih: “If our own country does not develop such technologies and others own them, they may prioritise their own citizens.”

That is not paranoia. It is what happened in 2021 when vaccines were delayed due to hoarding by the manufacturing countries or because of logistical issues. It is what will happen to us again, if we do not act.

The foundation is laid. The minister has named the mission. All that remains is the building.

The writer can be contacted at [email protected].

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.