The Network School Malaysia shutdown was formalised on 22 July 2026, when the Iskandar Puteri City Council revoked the business licence of NS0 Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., the legal entity behind Balaji Srinivasan’s experiment in building a new kind of society from the ground up.
Srinivasan, who served as chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and as a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz before renouncing his American citizenship in 2023, had billed the Network School as ‘a frontier community for techno-optimists.’ The programme sits at the first rung of a seven-stage plan, laid out in his book The Network State, for constructing a new country from scratch.
The campus was located at Forest City, a sprawling $100-billion development built on reclaimed land in Johor state. The Wall Street Journal described it as ‘part tech incubator, part self-improvement retreat,’ housed in an abandoned hotel. Attendees reported mouldy rooms and complained about a shortage of women and nightlife.
How the Network School Malaysia Shutdown Unfolded
The sequence that led to the revocation began with a social media video that was vague about the school’s location. Online investigators identified Forest City after a 10 July advertisement described the site as a ‘man-made island near Singapore.’ A pro-Palestinian activist group posted on Instagram the same day, accusing the Network School of bringing Israeli nationals into Malaysia, a country with which Israel has no diplomatic relations.
A subsequent investigation found no evidence of travel document violations. The council revoked the licence anyway, citing breaches of licensing conditions and premises-use requirements, and also cancelled the Network School’s advertising licence. The Johor state government announced its full support for the decision, according to Fortune.
Malaysia’s digital economy agency, MDEC, added a further layer of consequence. It stated that the revocation of NS0’s business licence constituted a breach of conditions attached to the company’s Malaysia Digital status, which requires obtaining all relevant permits and licences and complying with applicable regulations, according to TechNode Global.
The geopolitical undercurrent had been building for some time. In 2023, Srinivasan used the term ‘tech Zionism’ to describe the network-state strategy of accumulating land and pursuing self-determination. Fortune noted the phrase ‘landed badly in a country where public sentiment is strongly pro-Palestinian.’
After the Wall Street Journal contacted him for comment, Srinivasan published a lengthy post on X declaring himself ‘a proud Singaporean’ and accusing the paper of preparing a ‘hit piece’ that would portray him as ‘an odd duck […] as opposed to an early adopter.’
Kazakhstan Steps In as the Next Frontier
The Network School Malaysia shutdown has not, for the moment, derailed the broader project. Srinivasan has signed a memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, formalised alongside Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev. The agreement runs for five years and covers organising international events and hackathons, with a possible Network State conference in Kazakhstan pencilled in for 2026, according to Fortune.
The Straits Times reports the Kazakhstan campus is intended to function as a hub for global technology talent, offering faster visa processing, relocation support, talent recruitment, AI education programmes, research activities, support for tech start-ups, and hosting of international programmes for researchers.
Kazakhstan has been positioning itself as an emerging technology destination. The country has plans for Central Asia’s first ‘crypto city’ in Alatau, according to CoinTelegraph, making the pairing with a network-state experiment less surprising than it might first appear.
The move also carries a certain logic for Srinivasan. A country keen to attract technology investment and international attention is likely to be more accommodating than a middle-income nation navigating sensitive diplomatic alignments and a politically engaged public. Whether Kazakhstan offers the stability that Forest City could not is the question his project now has to answer.
