World Fears a Wider Trade War. Malaysia Sees an Opportunity.

With Donald J. Trump promising tariffs, Malaysia hopes a deal with Singapore for greater economic integration will strengthen its role as a China alternative.

During his first term as president, when Donald J. Trump started a tariff war to pit the United States against China, Malaysia bet on both sides. The Southeast Asian nation aggressively courted American and Chinese companies with tax breaks and other goodies.

The strategy worked. Malaysia, a linchpin in China’s push for influence through its economic might, has brought in multibillion-dollar investments from companies including Texas Instruments and Lam Research of the United States and Alibaba and Geely of China.

With Mr. Trump headed back to the White House, and threatening to disrupt global trade again, Malaysia is hoping it can build on that approach with a plan to turn its southern tip into a hub for multinational companies looking for a safe haven.

It involves an economic agreement with its neighbor Singapore, historically sometimes more of a competitor than a partner. Singaporean officials are embracing cooperation, too. Negotiators are wrapping up the details of a special Malaysian economic zone where companies will be given financial incentives to build factories.

The point is to give multinational companies based in Singapore, an island city-state on Malaysia’s southern border, the room and workers they need to expand their operations. Construction and investment on new facilities started this year and the prime ministers of Malaysia and Singapore will sign a final pact when they meet at an annual retreat on Dec. 8 and 9.

The timing is opportunistic: American companies have put in place plans to cut their China ties in the days since Mr. Trump was re-elected, while Chinese companies have been reaching out to Malaysian officials.

Some investors still worry about doing business in Malaysia, where a corruption scandal brought the government down and cost one Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, $3.9 billion to settle charges for its role in the saga. Political stability is another concern: Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is the country’s fifth leader in six years.

But a steady stream of investment from Chinese and American companies has made Malaysia one of the fastest-growing hubs for data centers, the hulking buildings that power artificial intelligence systems. And the country is one of the biggest exporters of semiconductors, the tiny chips packed into everything including cars, computers and ultrasound machines.

With President-elect Trump threatening tariffs of 60 percent on Chinese goods, the new special economic zone could offer another alternative for global companies as they start to cut their China production and look for safer shores.

It is part of a broader effort to attract investment from China and the United States, two of Malaysia’s top trading partners, while also benefiting from the trade war between the two that has disrupted global supply chains.

“If there is more of a shift toward what we call protectionism, that is going to give more room for neutral countries like Malaysia and Singapore to make full use of our natural advantage,” said Lee Ting Han, a Malaysian official in the state of Johor, where the special economic zone is being developed.

If there was any lesson to be learned from Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Lee said, it was that he will make good on his promise to increase tariffs on China after he takes office in January. Chinese companies looking for other locations for factories have already expressed concern that they could face U.S. tariffs if they move from China and start exporting from Malaysia, he said.

Mr. Lee tells the companies, he said, that their risks of avoiding U.S. tariffs will be mitigated if they qualify under the free trade agreements that Malaysia is a part of.

But when it comes to Mr. Trump’s promise of a universal tariffs of as much as 20 percent on all foreign products, that is a problem that Malaysia may not be able to attenuate.

Malaysia has so far secured billions of dollars from American companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft and Google, to build in the economic zone. It has also wooed Chinese companies like ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

Officials have promised the Malaysian public that the deal will bring more than 100,000 jobs. Singapore’s minister of state for trade and industry, Alvin Tan, told Parliament in October that the special economic zone “allows both sides to build on each other’s complementary strengths to better compete for global investments together.”

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more global companies have moved their Asian headquarters to Singapore, driving up the cost of everything from food to rent. Many of them want to expand but cannot afford to within Singapore. Malaysia’s proximity, cheap land and resources, and weaker currency make it attractive.

For now, most of the investments in the special economic zone have been in data centers, which do not tend to employ many people and require huge amounts of electricity and water for cooling.

One day in September at the construction site for Bridge Data Centers, South Asian workers in vests and hard hats were being ferried by pickup trucks to work from their corrugated tin dorms. Their employer was China State Construction Engineering, a Chinese state-owned company. ByteDance will be the facility’s anchor tenant.

A 15-minute drive away, another dusty construction site looked out of place surrounded by palm trees. It’s the location of a large Nvidia data center that is part of a $4.3 billion partnership with YTL Power International, an energy subsidiary of one of Malaysia’s biggest conglomerates. Workers driving heavy trucks deep into a palm plantation used a different road — sturdier so it could bear the weight.

Many of the targets for the special economic zone are focused on improving the flow of people on the border between Singapore and Johor, so that companies and workers in Singapore have a cheaper option to live and operate.

Each day, hundreds of thousands of workers on motorbikes cram side by side for hours to cross the border from Malaysia to Singapore. It is one of the world’s busiest crossings. The new special economic zone will make it easier, with QR codes replacing passports. A $2 billion high-speed rail link is scheduled to start running in 2027.

Malaysia intends to expand the trade area to include investments into other sectors like manufacturing, health care and logistics. Money that has come in is already helping to lift the economy in the short term, said Euben Paracuelles, chief ASEAN economist at Nomura, the Japanese bank. Pledges made by American tech companies over the past year alone account for 5.5 percent of Malaysia’s gross domestic product, by his calculation.

Global tariffs levied by a new Trump administration could make things more difficult for Malaysia. But some of Malaysia’s neighbors are more vulnerable to attacks by Mr. Trump because of the nature of the foreign investment they have taken in.

“You could argue countries like Vietnam are at risk of being slapped with China-type tariffs because they are quite clearly just channeling Chinese exports to the U.S.,” Mr. Paracuelles said.

Malaysia, instead, has attracted large investments for long-term projects from both the United States and China.

“In Malaysia’s case, because it is both U.S. and Chinese companies that are investing, it might make Trump more cautious,” Mr. Paracuelles said.

Like their counterparts around the world, Malaysian officials are just beginning to digest the re-election of Mr. Trump. Some have started to float another idea: that Malaysia diversify beyond China and the United States.

“The world may enter into a situation where there may be a U.S. supply chain and a China supply chain,” said Chin Tong Liew, Malaysia’s deputy minister of investment, trade and industry. “Then the rest is up for grabs. There will be a middle ground, and the more resilient our supply chain is the better.”