Southeast Asia in the AI Race: Access, Affordability and Resilience
Zenobia Chan, author
Date of publication:
2026
Publisher:
ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute
Number of pages:
24
Code:
TRS24/26
Soft Cover
ISBN: 9789815361957
About the publication
- Great power competition over artificial intelligence is often framed as a race to build the most capable frontier model. For Southeast Asia, the central question is whether governments, firms and citizens can access AI that is affordable, reliable, locally relevant and politically accessible.
- The region’s dependence extends across the AI stack, including chips, cloud platforms, data centres, energy systems, foundation models and development tools. This dependence becomes a vulnerability when suppliers cannot be replaced quickly, affordably and without serious disruption.
- The United States and China are pursuing frontier AI under different constraints. The key contrast is not “large US models” versus “small Chinese models”; it is compute-abundant scaling versus compute-constrained adaptation. US labs benefit from advanced chips, hyperscale cloud infrastructure and deep capital markets, while Chinese firms face tighter hardware constraints and therefore stronger incentives to improve efficiency, reduce prices, adapt models to domestic chips and release open-weight systems. These contrasting pathways offer users in Southeast Asia different mixes of capability, cost, openness and political risks.
- Stakeholders in Southeast Asia are responding through mixed AI stacks rather than aligning exclusively with either ecosystem. Initiatives such as Singapore’s SEA-LION and MERaLiON, Indonesia’s Sahabat-AI, Thailand’s Typhoon models and Vietnam’s AI Factory combine foreign technologies with local language data, evaluation capacity and locally developed applications.
- The policy goal should not be AI self-sufficiency, which is unrealistic for most states. It should be AI resilience: ensuring that essential AI systems remain affordable, locally effective, continuously available, and replaceable when suppliers, prices, access rules or physical infrastructure change.
- Building this resilience will require governments to preserve switching capacity, invest in local language data and independent evaluation, strengthen cloud and infrastructure continuity, and cooperate regionally on procurement, interoperability and testing standards.
Contents
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Southeast Asia in the AI Race: Access, Affordability and Resilience
[Whole Publication, ISBN: 9789815361964], by Zenobia Chan, author
