Southeast Asia has $60-bn AI boom but startups are missing

SOUTHEAST ASIA is fast emerging as an investment hot spot for AI leaders like Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp., which are plowing money into cloud services and data centers.

- Olivia Poh & Saritha Rai

But the region's own young tech companies are failing to capitalize on the boom.

While the world's biggest companies are set to splurge up to $60 billion over the next few years in Southeast Asia as its young populations embrace video streaming, online shopping and generative AI, little is flowing to the region's startups that have artificial intelligence at their core. Investors are wary about betting on unproven entities, and the region has yet to show it can produce innovative firms that can scale significantly.

Venture investment in Southeast Asia's young AI firms has amounted to just $1.7 billion so far this year, out of about $20 billion for the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, data from Preqin shows. Only 122 AI funding deals have taken place in Southeast Asia in 2024, versus the APAC total of 1,845.