Southeast Asia has become an important stage for global technology competition.

Reference News Network August 4 report: The UK's The Economist website published an article titled "Southeast Asia Becomes a Key Stage for Global Technology Competition" on July 29. The full text is as follows:

Southeast Asia has become a key stage for global technology competition.

Southeast Asia has nearly 700 million people, many of whom are tech-savvy young people. Being adjacent to China and other large economies (such as Australia, Japan, and India), it makes Southeast Asia an ideal base for serving global customers.

In Southeast Asian countries, Singapore and Malaysia have benefited the most from the artificial intelligence competition. Singapore has good governance, economic stability, and skillfully handles relations with both the United States and China. Singapore now carries 60% of the data center power load in Southeast Asia.

Chinese companies have acted quickly. Two Chinese internet giants, Huawei and Alibaba, have built data centers throughout the region. This further proves that China is building its own similar technology system rather than merely circumventing U.S. export controls.

At the same time, the three major U.S. cloud service providers - Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft - are also making significant investments in Southeast Asia. Amazon and Microsoft hold 60% of the market share in the region's cloud service infrastructure. Amazon plans to invest $9 billion to expand its business in Singapore by 2028; Microsoft has committed to investing $4 billion in Malaysia and Indonesia; Alphabet is building a $2 billion data center in Malaysia and investing $1 billion in Thailand. Many U.S. tech giants have their Asian headquarters in Singapore - including Alphabet, Apple, Meta platform company, and Microsoft.

The most telling example might be the collaboration between the U.S. cloud service company Oracle and ByteDance. According to data from the U.S. semiconductor research consulting company, this partnership has transformed Johor State in Malaysia (adjacent to Singapore) into the world's second-largest artificial intelligence hub. Most of Oracle's graphics processing unit capacity (used for training artificial intelligence models) in the region is supplied to ByteDance.

Oracle's data centers are built by DayOne Data Center. DayOne Data Center CEO Qiu Shimin said that President Trump's "Artificial Intelligence Action Plan" announced on July 23 was a "positive" message for data center projects across Asia. She added that the uncertainty of U.S. export control policies at the beginning of the year had worried the industry, and Trump's new policy provides clearer rules for Asian companies to use high-end chips with U.S. technology. According to the semiconductor research consulting company, DayOne's largest client is ByteDance, and the second-largest client is Oracle. Oracle and DayOne are also jointly building a large cloud facility in Indonesia.

The role of Southeast Asia in the global technology economy - as both a partner and a geopolitical buffer zone - will become increasingly important. (Translated by Guo Jun)

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7534632092064334371/

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