Malaysian telecom operator U Mobile and solar energy developer HLGY Energy signed a Memorandum of Understanding on October 12, 2026, to explore private 5G connectivity for smart solar farms, according to a report from SoyaCincau. The deal pairs U Mobile’s ULTRA5G private network technology with HLGY Energy’s utility-scale solar portfolio, aiming to bring autonomous drone inspections, AI-powered analytics, and smart CCTV surveillance to Malaysian solar sites. It’s a hardware story as much as a telecom story: the agreement signals that private 5G radios, edge sensors, and battery-storage controllers are becoming standard equipment on renewable-energy infrastructure, not just factory floors.
The news arrives as Malaysia pushes to grow its renewable energy base under the Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme (CRESS), a government framework that lets private companies buy clean power directly from generators. HLGY Energy’s named project under the MoU, the Kedah Rubber City Solar Power Plant, is one of the sites expected to benefit from the kind of connectivity and automation hardware the two companies are now exploring together.
Industry insights, the latest tech news, and special interviews, all in the Tech Insider Newsletter.
One email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Don't miss new tech stories on Google
Add Tech Insider once in the Google app and our stories appear in your news suggestions.
The MoU is exploratory rather than a signed construction contract, but its scope is specific. U Mobile is positioned as the innovation, automation, and communications-infrastructure partner, while HLGY Energy brings its experience developing and operating utility-scale solar and integrated energy assets under CRESS. Together, the companies plan to examine how private 5G connectivity, delivered through U Mobile’s ULTRA5G network, can support three categories of smart-farm technology: autonomous drone inspections of solar panel arrays, AI-powered analytics for performance monitoring, and smart CCTV surveillance for site security.
A fourth area under discussion goes beyond monitoring and into energy management: integrating AI with solar generation and battery energy-storage systems (BESS) to optimize when power is stored versus dispatched to the grid or an off-taker. That detail matters because it shifts the conversation from “can we watch the solar farm remotely” to “can we make the solar farm’s economics better” — a distinction that determines whether telecom-energy tie-ups like this one generate recurring enterprise revenue or stay stuck as one-off pilots.
ULTRA5G is U Mobile’s branding for private 5G connectivity aimed at enterprise and industrial customers, distinct from the consumer mobile plans most people associate with the carrier. Private 5G networks differ from the public cellular grid in a specific way: the operator (or the enterprise customer, depending on the deployment model) controls a dedicated slice of spectrum and infrastructure on-site, which means traffic from drones, cameras, and sensors doesn’t compete with consumer phone traffic for bandwidth, and latency stays predictable even during network congestion elsewhere.
That predictability is the entire pitch for industrial customers. A solar farm spread across hundreds of acres of rural land typically has patchy or no public cellular coverage, and even where coverage exists, it wasn’t engineered for dozens of simultaneous drone video feeds or always-on surveillance cameras. U Mobile’s own track record of deploying rural connectivity hardware gives the HLGY Energy partnership a plausible technical foundation rather than a purely aspirational one.
How Lih Ren, Chief Business Officer at U Mobile, framed the collaboration’s ambitions directly: “This collaboration will demonstrate how U Mobile’s ULTRA5G network can enable the next generation of smart and sustainable infrastructure. By combining private 5G connectivity with AI and industrial automation, we aim to help HLGY Energy develop renewable energy assets that are safer, more efficient and increasingly autonomous,” he said, according to SoyaCincau’s report on the signing.
HLGY Energy’s business is developing and operating utility-scale solar and integrated energy solutions under Malaysia’s CRESS program, which lets corporate buyers procure renewable power through direct supply arrangements rather than relying solely on the national grid operator. The Kedah Rubber City Solar Power Plant is the named project tied to this MoU, situated within an industrial zone in Kedah state that has become a target for renewable-energy investment as manufacturers there look to meet sustainability commitments from their own customers and regulators.
Kenneth Yap, Chairman and Executive Director of HLGY Energy, described the complementary nature of the partnership: “Malaysia’s green energy transition needs renewable energy infrastructure that is reliable, efficient and built for the future. Our collaboration with U Mobile brings together solar energy expertise and private 5G connectivity to explore how AI and automation can improve the way we operate and manage our solar assets,” he said, per the same SoyaCincau report.
Yap also addressed the battery-storage angle specifically: “Integrating AI with solar generation and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) operations can optimise when energy is stored and supplied, help reduce electricity costs and extend equipment life.” That statement is worth sitting with, because it reframes the private 5G network as plumbing for an AI decision layer sitting on top of the solar farm’s hardware, rather than connectivity as the end goal itself.
Utility-scale solar installations present a specific set of connectivity problems that public networks and standard Wi-Fi struggle to solve. Panel arrays are spread across open terrain with few structures to mount access points on, inverter and switchgear enclosures create interference, and the sites are frequently in rural areas where the nearest cell tower wasn’t built with industrial data loads in mind. Running fiber to every inverter pad and camera post is expensive and slow to deploy compared with standing up a private cellular radio.
Private 5G also solves a security and reliability problem that matters more in critical infrastructure than in a typical office: network segmentation. Keeping drone telemetry, surveillance footage, and BESS control signals on a dedicated private network, separate from public internet traffic, reduces the attack surface available to anyone trying to interfere with a grid-connected energy asset. This is a point the same hardware cluster has covered from a different angle, including the 4G vs 5G voice-quality comparison that showed network choice has real, measurable performance consequences, and the AWS Wavelength vs. Azure Edge Zones breakdown of how edge-compute placement affects latency for exactly this kind of industrial IoT traffic.
The three applications named in the MoU — autonomous drone inspections, AI-powered analytics, and smart CCTV — each require different pieces of hardware stitched together by the private network. Drone inspections typically mean fixed-wing or multirotor units with thermal and RGB cameras that fly pre-programmed routes over panel rows, looking for cracked cells, hot spots caused by failed bypass diodes, or vegetation encroachment, then stream footage back over the private 5G link for processing rather than storing it locally for manual retrieval later.
AI-powered analytics sits downstream of that data collection, running inference models that flag anomalies in panel output, inverter performance, or string-level voltage drops faster than a human technician reviewing spreadsheets could. Smart CCTV, meanwhile, covers perimeter security for sites that can span hundreds of acres with minimal staffing on-site overnight. None of this is conceptually new in industrial IoT, but deploying it across a dispersed solar farm specifically depends on having wireless backhaul that can carry continuous video and sensor telemetry without the packet loss or jitter that plagues congested public networks. Readers who followed the debate between autonomous surveillance systems and staffed alternatives may recall similar tradeoffs surfacing in the Elgin College vs. Flock Safety camera coverage, and the drone-deployment questions echo the operational use case in the Commerce City police drone story, even though that case involved law enforcement rather than energy infrastructure.
The battery energy-storage piece of the MoU is arguably the most commercially significant, even though it’s the least developed in public statements so far. Solar generation is intermittent by nature, peaking at midday and falling to zero overnight, while electricity demand and pricing follow a different curve entirely. BESS installations bridge that gap by storing excess solar output and discharging it when it’s more valuable, either because grid prices are higher or because a CRESS off-taker needs power at a specific time.
Deciding exactly when to charge and discharge a battery system is a continuous optimization problem that benefits from AI models fed by real-time generation, weather, and pricing data, which again depends on reliable connectivity between the solar array, the BESS controller, and whatever system is making those calls. Grid-scale battery deployment has been accelerating well beyond Malaysia, a trend covered in detail in the report on AI data centers fueling battery storage demand, which outlines how battery hardware has become a bottleneck resource across multiple industries simultaneously, not just renewable energy.
CRESS gives corporate electricity buyers in Malaysia a direct route to renewable power, letting a manufacturer or data center operator contract with a solar developer like HLGY Energy instead of buying exclusively from the state utility. The scheme has become a central mechanism for Malaysia’s clean-energy targets because it shifts financing risk toward private capital while still requiring grid interconnection and regulatory oversight. Industrial buyers under pressure from their own international customers to show lower carbon footprints have been among the most active CRESS participants, which is part of why solar developers operating under the scheme are now looking for ways to make their assets more efficient and better monitored.
For U Mobile, a CRESS-anchored developer is also a useful kind of enterprise customer: one with a concrete, revenue-generating asset that needs connectivity infrastructure built once and operated continuously, rather than a shorter engagement. That business logic is consistent with how private 5G has been marketed to industrial customers elsewhere, where the sales pitch centers on recurring managed-network contracts rather than one-time hardware sales.
The HLGY Energy MoU doesn’t come out of nowhere for U Mobile. On September 22, 2026, the carrier and equipment vendor ZTE demonstrated a portable, fully solar-powered 5G site built around a 12-metre lightweight pole, high-efficiency solar panels, a battery backup rated for 52 hours without sunlight, and satellite backhaul to U Mobile’s core network, according to U Mobile’s own newsroom announcement. That proof-of-concept, tested at SK Mentu primary school in Sebuyau, Sarawak, and a community hall in Sipitang, Sabah, hit peak download speeds of 134 Mbps and could reportedly be installed in three days versus close to a year for a conventional rural tower.
That demonstration was framed around closing rural connectivity gaps rather than industrial automation, but the underlying hardware — solar-powered, self-contained, grid-independent 5G infrastructure — is directly relevant to a solar farm site that similarly lacks nearby fiber or reliable grid power at every corner of the property. It suggests U Mobile already has field-tested equipment it can adapt for the HLGY Energy collaboration rather than starting from a blank sheet.
Consumer mobile plans in Malaysia, like most mature markets, face pricing pressure and slowing subscriber growth, which is pushing carriers toward enterprise and industrial connectivity as a growth lever. Private 5G for manufacturing, ports, mining, and now renewable energy sites represents a different kind of contract: longer-term, higher-margin, and tied to a customer’s operational infrastructure rather than a monthly consumer subscription that can be switched with a port-out request.
Networking hardware vendors stand to benefit from this shift too, since private 5G deployments require base stations, edge compute, and switching infrastructure sized for industrial sites rather than dense urban macro cells. The broader industrial-networking hardware market has been expanding rapidly on the data-center side, illustrated by the throughput jump detailed in coverage of Marvell’s 102.4 Tbps AI switch launch, even though that specific product targets data centers rather than solar farms. The common thread is that connectivity hardware vendors are increasingly selling into infrastructure sectors that had little need for high-bandwidth networking a decade ago.
Telecom-energy tie-ups aren’t unique to Malaysia, but the specific combination of private 5G, drone inspection, AI analytics, and BESS optimization under one MoU is a fairly complete package compared with piecemeal connectivity deals seen elsewhere. The table below places the U Mobile-HLGY Energy MoU against the general categories of connectivity approaches solar developers have used for site monitoring, based on confirmed details from the MoU itself.
The second table summarizes the confirmed components of the MoU and U Mobile’s related field-tested hardware, pulling together what’s been verified from the companies’ own statements and U Mobile’s prior ZTE demonstration.
Beyond the headline announcement, both executives used their public statements to signal broader ambitions than this single MoU. How Lih Ren, U Mobile’s Chief Business Officer, positioned the carrier as a long-term enterprise partner rather than a one-deal vendor: “Beyond connectivity, our ambition is to be a trusted digital solutions partner to enterprises across Malaysia. We look forward to applying our network and technology capabilities to support the country’s renewable energy aspirations, including the Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme (CRESS),” he said, according to SoyaCincau.
Kenneth Yap, Chairman and Executive Director of HLGY Energy, kept his framing closer to the operational payoff: reliable connectivity and automation translating into lower electricity costs and longer equipment life through better BESS management. Malaysian technology outlets such as Lowyat.NET have tracked U Mobile’s broader enterprise-network ambitions over the past year, and this MoU fits a pattern of the carrier expanding beyond its consumer mobile business into infrastructure-grade connectivity contracts.
5G’s early marketing in Malaysia and globally centered on consumer speed claims and gaming latency, but the technology’s more durable business case has shifted toward private industrial deployments where dedicated bandwidth and network slicing solve real operational problems. U Mobile’s own history traces that shift: from competing in the consumer prepaid market to building rural connectivity infrastructure with ZTE, and now to courting renewable-energy developers with the same underlying private-network playbook. HLGY Energy’s participation reflects the mirror-image trend on the energy side, where solar and BESS operators that once treated connectivity as an afterthought now see it as core infrastructure for maximizing asset performance under schemes like CRESS.
What did U Mobile and HLGY Energy actually sign?
A Memorandum of Understanding on October 12, 2026, to explore private 5G connectivity for smart solar farms in Malaysia. It is exploratory, not a binding construction contract.
What is ULTRA5G?
ULTRA5G is U Mobile’s private 5G network offering for enterprise and industrial customers, separate from its consumer mobile plans.
Which solar project is named in the agreement?
The Kedah Rubber City Solar Power Plant, operated by HLGY Energy under Malaysia’s Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme (CRESS).
What technology applications are planned?
Autonomous drone inspections, AI-powered analytics, and smart CCTV surveillance, plus exploration of AI-optimized battery energy-storage system (BESS) operations.
Has U Mobile deployed solar-powered 5G hardware before?
Yes. On September 22, 2026, U Mobile and ZTE demonstrated a portable, fully solar-powered 5G site reaching 134 Mbps peak speeds with 52-hour battery backup, tested in rural Sarawak and Sabah.
What is CRESS?
The Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme is a Malaysian regulatory framework that lets corporate buyers procure renewable electricity directly from developers like HLGY Energy, rather than solely through the national grid utility.
Why do solar farms need private 5G instead of public mobile networks?
Utility-scale solar sites are often large, rural, and poorly served by public cellular coverage. Private 5G provides dedicated bandwidth for continuous drone video, AI analytics, and surveillance traffic without competing with consumer network congestion.
Is there a confirmed investment amount or rollout date for the solar farm deployment?
No. The companies have not disclosed specific deployment locations beyond the Kedah Rubber City project, investment figures, or a commercial launch timeline, based on currently available reporting.
Sofia Lindström is the Editor-in-Chief at Tech Insider, where she leads editorial strategy and oversees coverage across AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise technology. With over a decade in Swedish tech journalism, she previously served as technology editor at Dagens Industri and covered the Nordic startup ecosystem for Breakit. Sofia holds an MSc in Media Technology from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and is a frequent speaker at Web Summit and Slush. She is passionate about making complex technology accessible to business leaders.
The Tech Insider Newsletter
Industry insights, the latest tech news, and special interviews, every week.
One email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Tech Insider delivers in-depth coverage of the technologies shaping the future: AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing, hardware, and the trends that matter.
Tech Insider delivers in-depth coverage of the technologies shaping our future. From AI and cybersecurity to cloud computing and hardware innovation, our editorial team covers the trends that matter.
Tech Insider delivers in-depth coverage of the technologies shaping our future. From AI and cybersecurity to cloud computing and hardware innovation, our editorial team covers the trends that matter.
English | Svenska | Français | Suomi
We use cookies to measure traffic and improve Tech Insider. Read our Privacy Policy.
The Tech Insider Newsletter: industry insights, tech news, and special interviews.
