Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow and InvestPenang chief executive Dato' Seri Loo Lee Lian spent eight days in San Jose at the end of September. Sixteen meetings, most of them at the headquarters of American companies that already run operations in Penang: Intel, AMD, Micron, Lam Research, Intuitive, and a few more. The pitch was chip design, the new ATE campus in Batu Kawan, and a first half of 2026 in which Penang topped Malaysia in approved manufacturing investment at about €3.8 billion.
They came home with good leads. Chow said as much the day after landing: a very positive outcome, investment will come, but the companies will do their studies first and decide in their own time. Anyone who has sold anything in B2B knows that sentence. It is the best thing a serious buyer says at the end of a first meeting.
Four days later came the answer to a different pitch. Budget 2027 put Penang on the map, in capital letters, as the nation's technology finance centre, with a €33 million fund behind it that Penang shares with Khazanah and, of all partners, Selangor. The same budget carried a 40-year water deal with Perak and money for the roads around the airport and the port.
A sales trip, read by a salesman
Does a trip like this produce anything? Chow led the same mission in 2024. Two of the companies he visited then, Monolithic Power Systems and Efinix, opened new Penang engineering sites this year, roughly two years after the meeting. AMD and Coherent, also on that list, expanded here in 2025. No press release credits the trip, and nobody expects one to. That is how industrial sales work everywhere. My fellow Finnish exporters know the cycle; they rarely see a regional government run it.
I wrote earlier in this series about how Penang's ecosystem was built: Intel in 1972, then the rest, each arrival making the next one cheaper. The San Jose trip is that playbook run from the other direction. Instead of waiting for the next anchor to turn up, the state goes to the anchor and asks.
The finance centre has the same shape. Last year Penang pitched a ten-billion-ringgit international financial centre on a hundred acres. Putrajaya said there was no policy for it. The state kept talking, dropped the word “international”, and got a sentence in the budget and the seed of a fund, with Khazanah matching Penang’s own money. The first proposal rejected, a smaller first order booked. Any salesman recognises the outcome.
The fund is small; a single advanced chip costs more to design than the whole thing. What matters is who runs it. In the hands of a venture manager with a network in Singapore, Taiwan or the United States, €11 million from Penang is the ticket that brings a foreign lead investor into local deals, which most founders here cannot do on their own. Run by an agency, it is a grant programme with a different name. The blueprint due in November should say which one it is, and that is the first question I would ask if I were investing here.
What a budget is for
The Prime Minister's speech has a line early on that I would put on the wall of any investment agency: a truly successful economy is not one that merely grows, but one that answers to the lives of its people. The budget's title is a version of the same thought, reach for the skies while staying rooted to the ground.
Penang's own leadership has been saying this for a while. The Chief Minister wants investment judged by whether it improves living conditions for residents, rather than by investment figures alone, and says a smart state is not about having more technology but about technology bringing real benefits to people. The man in charge of the roads has said that if the streets are too hot to walk to transit and the public spaces are unusable, the urban systems are failing.
Readers of this series will recognise the thought. In June I wrote about why nobody plans to stay in Penang and everyone does, and I borrowed a line Robert Kuok is said to have used: economics, in the end, is simply people living their lives. It's all just people, living their lives. It now turns out to be the position of the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister and the man in charge of the roads as well.
See: Nobody plans to stay in Penang
The pothole test
On 8 October, three days after Chow got back, the four Nordic embassies in Malaysia brought a Smart City Roadshow to Penang. The Danish ambassador opened, the Finnish ambassador closed. Zairil Khir Johari, the state exco for infrastructure, transport and digital, set out Penang's priorities: the LRT, Silicon Island, electric buses, water security. Think City talked about green and connected places. Digital Penang presented its master plan, which, to its credit, carries a household income target next to the GDP one. Kamstrup, Wirepas, DNV, KONE and Ramboll presented what they do.
In the afternoon there was a business roundtable at Digital Penang whose content I was responsible for, pairing several Nordic companies with Penang's buyers and integrators, and a visit to Penang Port which is planning large modernisation and expansion.
Something happens at every event of this kind, in every city I know. The hosts present what they already have in place. That is a natural reflex: a city sells itself the same way a company does, and nobody opens a sales meeting with a list of what is missing or not working. Helsinki does it. Oulu does it. Penang does it. The visiting companies, meanwhile, came to find out what does not work yet, because that is where the business is. A good part of my job on the day was to get those two conversations into the same room.
When they did get into the same room, two things stuck with me. KONE's head of major projects explained how the company cuts a tall building's electricity bill: replace the steel hoisting ropes with carbon fibre. The rope weighs about a fifth of steel, so every trip moves less mass, for the life of the building. A banker at my table explained what his bank's ESG commitment means in practice. It pulls in customers who are already ESG-compliant, and a project with ESG credentials can move to the top of the pile when financing applications are reviewed. Neither of those is a smart city slogan. Both are the kind of answer the pothole test asks for: a number on an electricity bill, a place in a queue.
A journalist who sat through the morning collecting interviews told me afterwards what he had been waiting for and did not hear. Nobody mentioned the potholes. That is the kind of thing that actually matters to people.
He is right, and it is the most useful thing anyone said about the day. The island's city council has a standard for this: a reported pothole patched within 24 hours. Dato' Ooi Kee Beng, who runs Penang Institute, wrote this month that the prevalent culture in Penang, and Malaysia at large, is one of bad maintenance. None of this is news to anyone who lives here.
The point is that it is the measure. Smart city data, digital twins, connected buildings, port automation: all of it will eventually be judged on whether the road in front of someone's house gets fixed faster than it did before. That is Chow's measure, and Anwar's. It is the one I took from Kuok in June: it's all just people, living their lives. It is also the one most of us in the room forgot to say out loud.
What this means for a Finnish company looking south-east
If you are selling into Penang, the question you will be asked, sooner or later and sometimes by the Chief Minister himself, is what your solution does for the person who lives here. Finnish companies are used to selling to engineers, and engineers rarely ask that question. Penang's leadership now does, in writing. The companies that can answer it in one sentence will find the door open, and there is a record investment year and a new fund behind that door. If your company invests rather than sells, the question to ask in Penang this autumn is who will manage that fund.
If your company builds things that make a city easier to live in, or makes the systems that run one, come have a look. I'm happy to point you to the right doors. And if you want to know whether a smart city project is real, ask about the potholes.