Southeast Asia’s digital economy is projected to grow 17 percent year on year to $368 billion in gross merchandise value in 2026 and to exceed $1 trillion by 2035, according to the 11th annual e-Conomy SEA report released on October 21 by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company. Reuters reported the headline figures the same day, noting the forecast implies growth of about 13 percent a year through 2035, with what the authors called substantial headroom remaining.
The report, titled Building the Intelligent Economy, puts artificial intelligence at the centre of the region’s next phase. Generative AI has reached 243 million people, or 58 percent of the working population, in just under three years — scaling four times faster than the mobile internet did, the authors said.
AI Adoption Is Broad, But Usage Depth Lags
To measure how deeply AI is actually used, the report introduces AI usage quantified in tokens as the AI equivalent of gross merchandise value. Current regional use sits at roughly 5 to 7 quadrillion tokens in total, and per-capita consumption remains far below richer markets: Reuters summarised the report’s comparison at about 5 million AI tokens per capita in Southeast Asia, against 60 million in the United States and 14 million in Europe.
Consumers account for about 60 percent of regional tokens, mostly for everyday work and study tasks. Enterprise workloads are strongest in the more mature markets, driving 45 to 60 percent of usage in Singapore and Malaysia. The authors project that demand could surge by up to 60-fold by 2030 as people move from simple searches to delegating complex tasks to AI agents.
Sector Numbers: Commerce, Travel, Media And Finance
E-commerce remains the largest sector at a projected $226 billion in gross merchandise value, up 18 percent, with 69 percent of shoppers using AI to compare complex purchases and 31 percent of searches now multimodal. Online travel is projected at $59 billion, up 10 percent, with generative AI platforms capturing 26 percent of trip-planning journeys, ahead of social media at 23 percent.
Online media is the fastest-growing sector, projected at $44 billion in revenue, up 22 percent, helped by AI-driven advertising. Mobility and food delivery are projected at $40 billion, up 15 percent. Digital financial services are measured separately by gross transaction value, projected at $1.65 trillion, up 16 percent, with digital lending balances growing 22 percent to $116 billion.
Funding, Data Centres And The Infrastructure Build-Out
The funding picture split in two. Private funding deals for digital-economy companies fell 28.4 percent in 2025 to 421 deals, and total private funding for the whole of 2025 was $11 billion. The first half of 2026 then attracted $21 billion, nearly double the prior full year, driven by two large data centre deals: an $11 billion transaction involving STT GDC and a $5 billion deal involving DayOne.
Built data centre capacity rose to 5.8 gigawatts by the first half of 2026, from 4 gigawatts at the end of 2025, and the report said AI compute and digital infrastructure attracted $20 billion in private deal value over the last 12 months. Total IPO proceeds in the region climbed to $8.5 billion in the 12 months to June 30, 2026, more than double the $3.6 billion of the prior period. The report sets four conditions for a 60-fold rise in AI usage by 2030: faster agentic adoption, roughly triple the data centre capacity in five years, better model and energy efficiency, and economics that show a return on investment.
Why It Matters
The e-Conomy SEA report matters because it gives the AI economy a regional scoreboard that goes beyond downloads and sign-ups. Southeast Asia has adopted generative AI at population scale, yet its per-person token use is a fraction of US levels, which means the growth story for Google and its rivals is about depth of use — agents, enterprise workloads and paid tiers — rather than first contact. That same pattern shapes stories across this site, from Google’s Gemini hub for small businesses to Google’s open Coral NPU design for edge AI and Moonshot AI’s move into Singapore as Kimi expands beyond China: the contest in Asia is now over who supplies the infrastructure and the everyday AI layer for hundreds of millions of users.
Background
The e-Conomy SEA report has been published annually since 2016 by Google and Temasek, with Bain & Company joining as a co-author in later editions, and it has become the standard reference for the size of Southeast Asia’s internet economy across ten markets. Early editions tracked e-commerce, travel, media and ride-hailing growth; recent editions have added digital financial services and, since the generative AI wave, measures of AI adoption and token consumption alongside the traditional gross merchandise value figures.
0 Comments