20231115 Cover Digital battle for Southeast Asia img main

Chinese and U.S. tech giants, including Huawei, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, are going head-to-head over Southeast Asia's rapidly expanding digital market. The region is home to some of the world's heaviest social media users. © Illustration by Yoshiko Kawano

Southeast Asia's digital battle: Chinese and U.S. Big Tech face off over $1tn market

Geopolitics drive competition in AI, cloud and e-commerce sectors amid social media boom

TSUBASA SURUGA, Nikkei staff writer, and AKITO TANAKA, Nikkei Asia chief business news correspondent

November 15, 2023 06:00 JST

SINGAPORE -- With a stable government, an abundance of talented engineers and state-of-the-art tech infrastructure, Singapore has become a key hub for tech companies from East and West. The city-state provides vast computing power to Southeast Asia's fast-expanding digital economy and is home to nearly half of the data center capacity in the region.

So last July, when Singapore announced the results of a tender to build new data centers -- the first since 2019 -- interest was huge.