Malaysia’s government-linked investment companies and their corporate networks are being asked to channel additional capital into the domestic economy under GEAR-uP, a programme running from 2024 through 2028. Finance Minister II Amir Hamzah Azizan said on 29 September that more than RM20 billion was invested in 2025 and a similar amount was expected in 2026. Bernama reported the remarks the following day. The initiative’s headline commitment is RM120 billion in domestic direct investment over the five-year period. It is a multi-year programme target, not a claim that RM120 billion has already been deployed.

A Ministry of Finance report card published in August gives a more precise retrospective figure: RM20.3 billion was allocated and deployed domestically in 2025, compared with RM6.6 billion in 2024. The 2025 total is an annual flow reported by the government, while RM120 billion is the cumulative 2024–2028 commitment. Those figures answer different questions and should not be conflated. The Finance Ministry describes RM440 billion of steady-state public-market investments separately from the RM120 billion domestic direct-investment goal; that separate portfolio figure is not another part of the announced DDI total to add to it.

The August report card identifies where some 2025 domestic deployment went: RM1.4 billion from Khazanah and KWAP into the higher-value semiconductor sector, and RM1.8 billion into digital and logistics infrastructure. These are selected programme components, not a full allocation table. They cannot be used to infer the entire sector split, and the source does not explain whether all these category amounts are mutually exclusive. The 2024 launch announcement had described intended areas such as energy transition, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors and financing for companies at different stages of growth. That earlier statement supplies programme design context; the 2026 report card supplies the more recent annual deployment figure.

The minister’s September update framed GEAR-uP as more than an investment-volume initiative. He said the New Industrial Master Plan guides investment toward sectors considered important for the national economy, and linked the programme to improving wages, economic complexity, investment quality and job opportunities. He also said more than 92 per cent of GLCs under GLICs had adopted a living wage since the start of 2026. The figure is a reported adoption share, not a wage increase percentage or a count of all workers in Malaysia. Bernama’s account does not define the living-wage benchmark or provide a company-level list, limiting independent assessment of coverage.

A related talent initiative, Bakat MADANI, is expected to provide internship and training opportunities to 25,000 people across 2026 and 2027, according to the minister. This is a prospective programme figure, not a count of placements already completed. The same announcement mentions investments connected with care workers and retirement villages in response to ageing-related priorities, but it does not publish investment amounts or expected care capacity. Separating these social and workforce elements from capital deployment matters: a training target is not investment spending, and a living-wage adoption claim is not itself evidence about the adequacy of wages or household income.

GEAR-uP was launched in August 2024 and is anchored by six government-linked investment companies: the Employees Provident Fund, Permodalan Nasional, KWAP, Khazanah, Tabung Haji and LTAT. The programme asks these institutions to invest commercially while supporting stated national development priorities. Its stated scale is large, but the available figures are government-reported and do not by themselves show additionality—that investments would not otherwise have occurred—or the distribution of returns and risks. Evaluation would require consistent reporting on annual commitments, signed and disbursed capital, sector allocation, private co-investment, project delivery, jobs, wages and returns, with clear separation between plans and realised outcomes.