As the saying goes, “data is the new currency”. This rings especially true today, as artificial intelligence (AI) is unlocking business transformation and fuelling an incredible surge in data demand across Southeast Asia.
At the same time, data and AI capabilities are becoming assets of national strategic importance, particularly in a world of growing geopolitical tensions.
These converging trends raise several questions: Where will all this data reside? How can Southeast Asia build the data and energy infrastructure it needs quickly while managing risks? What role can Singapore’s public and private sectors play in shaping the next phase of the region’s digital economy?
A new value chain
Looking past the hype, it is clear that AI is a multi-trillion-dollar game, set to drive 3.5 per cent of global GDP in 2030. Next-generation AI applications are evolving beyond mere pattern recognition capabilities to generate new multimedia content and even act autonomously.
This defining feature – the use of multiple modalities, including text, images, audio, and video – as core inputs, is transformative.
Applications include AI tools that respond to environmental changes in manufacturing, mobility, and logistics, and chatbots that tailor consumer recommendations based on visual data.
Alongside the rise of next-generation AI applications is a value chain that is emerging to support it – the platforms that enable the creation and deployment of AI-generated content, and the infrastructure to power and scale platforms and applications.
In particular, the explosion in data volume and real-time processing needs is driving an urgent demand for data centres optimised to handle vast streams of high-resolution image data that go beyond plain text, and at scale.
Data and AI as strategic assets
The rapid emergence of the AI value chain is happening at a time of growing geopolitical tensions, where data and AI sovereignty are matters of strategic importance, including in Southeast Asia.
Sovereign cloud has been a major focus area in recent years, with governments increasingly recognising the power of their data and the ability to store, process, and secure it onshore.
Now, with the rise of AI, sovereign AI is another key priority. Nation-states are finding value in owning their AI capabilities, as export controls are pushing them to develop their own capabilities in AI chips and, more widely, their AI ecosystems.
In Southeast Asia, governments are racing to attract investments and build hyperscale advanced data centres, subsidising land and electricity in some cases, signalling the intensifying competition to develop such AI ecosystems.
Besides national security, local AI capabilities are also valuable as they are tailored to their specific contexts.
For example, large-language models (LLMs) that “speak” Southeast Asia’s vernacular languages can address their under-representation in models commonly used today. Another example is in healthcare, where AI tools trained with data representative of the local population are crucial to ensure their accuracy.
