The Network School Malaysia shutdown is now official: the Iskandar Puteri City Council (MBIP) revoked the business licence of NS0 Malaysia Sdn Bhd and ordered all operations at the Forest City campus to cease, effective 22 July 2026. Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of a new society, it turns out, still needs to clear the zoning board first.
Why the Network School Malaysia Shutdown Happened
The closure followed an investigation initially framed around immigration law concerns. According to Reuters, MBIP ultimately cited licensing and premises violations as the formal grounds: the business activities conducted on-site differed from the office-use licence the company held.
The immigration probe itself found no evidence of travel document violations, as Fortune reported. What stuck was the gap between what NS0 told regulators it would do and what it was actually doing. MBIP also revoked the company’s advertising licence on the same basis.
Malaysia’s Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) piled on further. TechNode Global reported that MDEC stated conditions attached to Network School’s Malaysia Digital status required the company to obtain all relevant permits and comply with applicable regulations, and that the licence revocation constituted a breach of those requirements. So the Malaysia Digital badge, presumably an asset when pitching the programme to applicants, became a liability once the paperwork didn’t hold up.
Ghost City Meets Techno-Optimism
The campus itself was located inside Forest City, a $100 billion Chinese-built luxury development in Johor that famously became a mostly empty ghost town. Per the Wall Street Journal, Network School occupied an abandoned hotel and fitted it out with co-working spaces, a high-end gym, and meals designed by longevity enthusiast Bryan Johnson.
Srinivasan also surveyed potential residents on their politics and views on pronatalism, the WSJ reported. Attendees complained about mouldy rooms, a shortage of women, and a distinct lack of nightlife. The self-improvement retreat experience, apparently, had room for improvement.
The project bills itself as ‘a frontier community for techno-optimists’ and represents the first step in a seven-stage plan, laid out in Srinivasan’s book ‘The Network State’, for building an entirely new society. Srinivasan, who reportedly renounced his American citizenship in 2023, has described his ambition as ‘to start a new country.’ After the WSJ began asking questions about the programme, he published a lengthy post on X calling himself ‘a proud Singaporean’ and accusing the paper of preparing a ‘hit piece’ designed to make him look like ‘an odd duck […] as opposed to an early adopter.’
Forest City, meanwhile, has moved on. Johor has folded the development into the newly established Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone and designated it a special financial zone, with officials positioning it as a hub for international family offices and capital. The ghost city is rebranding; the Network School needed to find somewhere else regardless.
Kazakhstan Picks Up the Baton
One day after MBIP issued the shutdown order, Srinivasan announced a new home. A memorandum of understanding between Network School and Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development was signed with Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, according to Fortune. The MOU carries a five-year term and covers organising international events and hackathons, with a possible Network State conference in Kazakhstan also on the table.
The Straits Times reported that the Kazakhstan campus will offer AI education programmes, support technology start-ups, conduct research, and host international programmes for researchers, citing the announcement made on 22 July 2026.
Whether Kazakhstan proves more tolerant of the gap between a network state’s ideals and its actual licence applications remains the open question. Stage one of the seven-stage plan has now failed in at least one jurisdiction. Stage two is presumably still somewhere on the roadmap.
