The rain in Kuching doesn't arrive. It ambushes. You're walking the alleys of Kuching's old town, shophouses leaning over the five-foot way, the smell of the river and roasted kopi somewhere ahead — and then the sky opens and you're running. Not for the car, but for the nearest kopitiam, where you order a cold local craft beer and watch the street turn into a running river while the ceiling fan keeps turning, unbothered.
It's the kind of downpour that makes a Finn suspect this is where the famous Esteri comes from. More rain falls on Kuching in a year than on Finland in seven — but it's warm. In Finland, rain is a sentence to be served. Here it's an intermission: you don't endure it, you sit it out with a drink. And all that water is going somewhere useful — though I wasn't paying much attention to that yet.
I've come back to Sarawak again and again over the years. One of my favourite states in Malaysia. The rainforest. The hornbills. Proboscis monkeys. Orangutans. Kuching's old quarter: a George Town in miniature — loved and photographed, just never quite as famous. Warm people from dozens of language groups, with English the easy common tongue between them.
It's been a place for exploration — short getaways, the Kuching jazz festival down by the river, the jungle. I've spoken at conferences there, and brought Finnish speakers along with me.
And in all those years, I never put much effort into weighing what was sitting in plain sight. I knew it was there. I just didn't stop to look at it properly — the thing that vanishingly few Finnish companies have ever noticed.
Where does the water go?
What I'd been looking past was the energy.
Sarawak has always run on its water. The rivers were the old highways into the interior; now they have been turned into some of the largest hydropower in this part of the world, the quiet foundation under everything else. The rain I sat out in the kopitiam doesn't only flood the streets — it ends up behind a dam wall, waiting to become power.
And here is the part a Finn appreciates only after a dark winter: the sun and the rain cover for each other. On a blazing day the panels carry it 12 hours a day; when the clouds roll in and the panels slow down, that downpour from the clouds fills the reservoirs. When the sun goes down it just hands over the heavy lifting to water. They built exactly this on the Batang Ai dam: solar floating on a hydro lake, two sources hedging one bet.
It is, in the least romantic and most valuable sense, boring power. Steady. The same in January as in July, with no season that halves the output for half the year. That steadiness is precisely what heavy industry needs. Not peaks. A floor that never drops.
A second harvest
Malaysia's palm and timber industries produce more biomass than they know what to do with — fronds, shells, empty bunches, mill effluent — most of it still treated as waste. Sarawak, nearly two-thirds forest, sits on a large share of it.
This is where a Finn should sit up, because we have spent a century learning to turn exactly this kind of material — wood, residue, lignocellulose — into energy, fuel and something more valuable than either. It's one of the few places where Finnish competence maps onto a Malaysian resource almost one to one. And very few back home are looking at it.
The land of a thousand promises
Which brings me to hydrogen.
When it comes to hydrogen, Finland has been the land of a thousand promises — projects unveiled with great ceremony, then left forever one investment decision short of being built. Most of Europe is writing the same story.
Sarawak makes its share of promises too. But it holds the better cards.
I won't tell you Sarawak has cracked it — nobody has. But ask who actually holds what it takes to turn the promise into a plant: cheap, steady renewable power as the base; buyers in Japan, Korea and the whole emerging ASEAN market a short sea route away; a state government with its own money and the autonomy to spend it. That's a short list. Most of Europe isn't on it. Finland isn't either.
And that's only the loud part
The same cheap, green power that might one day fill a hydrogen tanker is already being turned to something nearer to hand: keeping the electrons in Sarawak and running valuable things on top of them. Renewable-powered data centres are going up on old plantation land, and the state has set itself the not-at-all-modest goal of becoming, in its own words, the “AI Powerhouse of Borneo” — its own AI centre, a semiconductor roadmap, even chips designed and built in Kuching.
Most of this is still ambition rather than achievement, and the state's own people will tell you the ecosystem is at an early stage. But the logic is the same as the dams: don't sell the raw resource cheap and buy the finished product back dear. Make the power at home, and run the valuable things — the compute, the chips — on top of it.
And that's the whole point, in miniature. The question was never whether any single one of these — the hydrogen, the chips, the data centres — is a sure thing. None of them is. The question is where the fundamentals actually line up. And that isn't something you answer about Malaysia. It's something you answer about a place.
The part a Finnish boardroom underestimates
I started with the rainforest and the rain for a reason. They are why I kept coming back — and coming back is why I eventually saw what almost no one at home does. The thing that makes Sarawak's bet credible isn't the dams or the biomass or the hydrogen slides. It's that none of it runs without people who build it and take pride in it. And I learned who those people are, of all places, in the back of a Grab in Sibu.
My driver was from one of Sarawak's indigenous communities. His family lived in a longhouse near his daughter's school — a dozen households under one long roof. By the time the ride ended, he had invited me to his child's fifth birthday.
I went. We spent the evening on the longhouse veranda, and one by one, every head of household down that long corridor came to press a glass of his own rice wine — tuak — into my hand, each certain his was the one I really had to try. You don't refuse. You can't, and you wouldn't want to.
That is the welcome here: proud of where they come from, without a trace of airs, and genuinely glad you turned up. It is the part a Finn, from a distance, never quite sees.
English is the working language here — more so than in much of the rest of Malaysia. With more than twenty local languages and a history of British rule, it is simply the convenient, practical common ground. And not only by convenience: officially, it is one of the state's two official languages, protected by Sarawak's own arrangement with the federal government. Children learn their science and mathematics in it. The state runs its own English-medium schools on a Cambridge curriculum, and is putting STEM degrees within reach for free.
For a Finnish company, that changes the arithmetic quietly but completely. Your engineers are understood on day one. Your people's children have somewhere to go to school. And the local talent pipeline is being pointed, deliberately, at exactly the industries you'd come here for.
And here is something most people never learn: Sarawak controls its own front door. Under the terms on which it joined Malaysia, the state runs its own immigration — it issues its own work passes, through its own system, and decides for itself who comes in to live and work. A permit for Kuala Lumpur is not a permit for Kuching.
For a company that can mean a little more paperwork. But it is the clearest proof of what kind of place this is: a state that doesn't wait for the capital to open the door, because it holds the handle itself. The same autonomy that lets it spend its own money lets it run its own door.
It's the same thing that kept me in Penang, really. Ease. A place where you can land and simply get on with the work, without a decade of friction first. Sarawak has that — and almost nobody at home knows it does.
Which Malaysia?
So no, I'm not telling you to move to Borneo.
I'm telling you that the next time someone in your boardroom says “Malaysia,” it's worth asking which Malaysia. The electronics coast and the data-centre south are well spoken for. The quiet one — forest, water, cheap power, warm rain and an open door — is the one nobody's fighting over yet.
That tends to be the moment worth looking. Before everyone else does.
I once wrote that nobody plans to stay in Penang; they just stop planning to leave. Sarawak is the opposite problem — hardly anyone back home knows it's there to begin with. Which makes now exactly the time to go and find out.