As Amartya Sen once argued, development is ultimately about expanding freedom. In the twenty-first century, that freedom is increasingly mediated by algorithms, data flows, and digital infrastructure that shape technological capacity.
Artificial intelligence is projected to add up to US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, roughly 14 percent of global GDP, according to PwC’s “Sizing the Prize.” Yet this transformation is uneven. As Dinis Guarda notes in The Great AI Divide, just ten countries may capture 70 to 75 percent of that value. IDC estimates that every US$1 invested in AI can generate US$4.60 in returns. AI is thus a multiplier of national power.
This explains the intensity of the US-China rivalry. The United States leads frontier innovation, from large language models to artificial general intelligence (AGI), while China excels in embodied AI, industrial robotics, and hardware integration. Beneath it lies a struggle over chokepoints: advanced semiconductors versus critical minerals and energy infrastructure.
For much of the Global South, the stakes are political and developmental. Concentration of AI value risks structural dependency, where data and profits flow outward while policy space narrows. Without strategic autonomy, developing economies risk absorption into rival digital blocs.
A quieter alignment is taking shape. Indonesia and Vietnam aim to reach developed-country status by 2045, while India has set 2047, its centenary of independence, as its own milestone. These synchronized horizons anchor deeper technological coordination among three middle powers converging around digital strategic autonomy.
This coordination reflects shared national interests. For India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, AI is less a prestige contest than a vehicle for structural transformation, echoing earlier waves of East Asian industrialization. The ambition is to reduce poverty and secure dignity through technological upgrading. The challenge lies in translating aspiration into institutional strategy.
India: Infrastructure as Strategy
India practices issue-based multi-alignment rather than bloc politics. In the digital domain, this translates into exporting Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): modular identity systems, payment rails, and governance frameworks that can be adapted across developing economies.
Through the IndiaAI Mission and projects like BharatGen, India invests heavily in domestic AI capacity while emphasizing “safe and trusted AI.” Governance is embedded into architecture. India’s objective is not alignment but institutionalized autonomy through interoperable public systems.
Indonesia: Sovereignty Through Transformation
Indonesia’s long-standing foreign policy doctrine of bebas dan aktif—literally “free and active,” meaning non-aligned yet proactively engaged—now extends into digital policy. The RPJPN 2025 to 2045 (Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Panjang Nasional, Indonesia’s 20-year National Long-Term Development Plan), together with the Government Digital Master Plan (RIPD 2025 to 2045), positions digital transformation as central to economic upgrading, institutional reform, and the strengthening of state capacity.
Initiatives such as Sahabat-AI, developed with India’s Tech Mahindra, show how private innovation can align with public strategy. The large language model (LLM) was initiated by industry but backed by Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, reflecting a hybrid model where entrepreneurial capability and state stewardship converge around linguistic sovereignty and deepening India–Indonesia technological ties. Making Indonesia 4.0 integrates IoT, robotics, and advanced manufacturing into the national strategy, embedding digital capacity into the 2045 trajectory.
Vietnam: Bamboo Diplomacy in Hardware
Vietnam contributes supply-chain resilience through what is often described as Bamboo Diplomacy, a posture that bends without breaking. Hanoi absorbs Western investment while maintaining proximity to China, managing tension through calibrated balance rather than overt alignment. This is not ambiguity for its own sake but a survival strategy shaped by history and geography.
Under the “China plus one” narrative, Vietnam has attracted NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SpaceX, Marvell, and Cadence into its semiconductor and AI ecosystem. Yet industrial zones in Bac Ninh and Hai Phong still rely heavily on components imported from China. Western capital flows in, Chinese components flow through, and Vietnam assembles without overt alignment. This is hedging in practice.
Vietnam’s ambition is codified in the recent directive from its Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), which explicitly targets “the training of 50,000 semiconductor engineers and 7,000 AI experts by 2030. ” This is not merely an educational objective; it is a strategic maneuver to move beyond assembly and secure the higher-value segment of the design supply chain.
Beyond the Duopoly
Individually constrained, together these states begin to resemble a layered triadic architecture of autonomy. This is not a bloc in the traditional sense, but a coordinated logic of resilience.
India anchors the software layer. Through Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), scalable identity and payment systems, public governance templates, and increasingly foundational AI ecosystems, it provides the protocol logic of the axis. In many ways, it functions as the operating system for more inclusive digital economies.
Vietnam consolidates the hardware layer. Its semiconductor assembly and upgrading ambitions, industrial robotics capacity, and supply-chain resilience under the “China plus one” configuration position it as a manufacturing hinge that connects global capital, regional logistics, and technological production.
Indonesia occupies the strategic interface layer, combining diverse data ecosystems, a vast digital consumer market, regulatory leverage through institutions such as OJK, and critical raw materials essential to AI hardware value chains.
If India builds the software architecture and Vietnam secures the hardware backbone, Indonesia shapes the data, market access, and regulatory logic that govern deployment at a societal scale.
Yet the architecture is not without friction. Supply chains remain externally entangled. Advanced chips are still controlled by a handful of firms. Capital flows are sensitive to geopolitical mood swings. Domestic bureaucratic coordination can lag behind technological ambition. And political perception, especially in Washington and Beijing, can quickly reinterpret diversification as alignment.
Indonesia must guard internal stability while balancing external expectations. Vietnam must upgrade from assembly to design without triggering retaliation. India must translate scale into institutional coherence. Coordination requires trust and regulatory interoperability.
These constraints mean the axis cannot rely on rhetoric alone. It requires a governance philosophy that reduces vulnerability without sliding into isolation. Here, Sovereign AI becomes a design principle rather than a slogan.
Sovereign AI as Modular Autonomy
Sovereign AI in this context is not digital protectionism but a form of modular autonomy. In a multiplex world, sovereignty is less about territory and more about design. Global cloud providers and hardware firms remain welcome to operate and invest, yet entry into large societies such as Indonesia’s 280 million citizens increasingly requires engagement through local regulatory frameworks and culturally attuned interfaces. Infrastructure may be global in scale, but the governance logic and cognitive layer through which technology touches daily life remain national.
This layered model produces interdependence rather than decoupling. Big Tech gains market access, while middle powers retain leverage over strategic data flows. It is negotiated participation rather than binary confrontation.
Toward a Multiplex AI Order
Properly framed, the India, Indonesia, and Vietnam axis complements rather than confronts the global AI ecosystem. By aggregating population scale, industrial capacity, regulatory experimentation, and strategic geography, these middle powers strengthen their negotiating position.
Yet realism demands caution. As middle powers, they lack coercive leverage. Divide-and-rule investment offers could weaken collective bargaining. Compute chokepoints, particularly advanced GPU and lithography dependencies, remain external. Interoperability may falter if national pride overrides alignment, and trained engineers could still be drawn abroad. Strategic ambition must therefore be matched by institutional discipline. Durability will depend on sustained policy coherence rather than rhetoric.
For much of the Global South, AI is less about AGI supremacy than about productivity, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) empowerment, financial inclusion, public-service efficiency, and industrial upgrading. Re-centering governance toward inclusive growth shifts its epistemic core.
This orientation aligns with discussions at the 2026 AI Safety Summit in India, where developmental impact and equitable access were central. The triad does not seek rupture but recalibration.
If sustained, this axis could increase Global South bargaining power, reduce dependency, and embed AI governance within long-term development strategies.
Middle powers must begin to think about AI on their own terms. Not as instruments of rivalry, but as tools of shared prosperity. Strategic autonomy, in this sense, is not about confrontation. It is about shaping technology in ways that remain open, mutually beneficial, and human-centric.
The Indo-Pacific’s future may depend not only on military deterrence but also on whether middle powers can collaborate to secure digital ecosystems and contribute to a more distributed AI order.
There is, however, an often overlooked physical layer beneath this digital ambition: subsea cables. Nearly 95 percent of global data traffic travels not through an abstract cloud, but through fiber-optic arteries laid across the ocean floor. Sovereign AI and digital public infrastructure may operate in the language of software, yet they ultimately depend on this submerged hardware.
Geographically, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam sit astride three of the Indo-Pacific’s most sensitive maritime corridors: the Indian Ocean sea lanes, the Strait of Malacca, and the South China Sea. These are trade routes and data routes alike. Yet much of the cable infrastructure remains financed or controlled by consortia linked to the United States and China.
This asymmetry presents a strategic vulnerability. In times of tension, cables can be surveilled or disrupted. A sovereignty strategy that ignores this backbone risks becoming performative.
For the triad, digital sovereignty must extend beneath the surface, requiring diversified cable ownership, redundancy routes, trusted landing stations, and maritime infrastructure protection. Only then can software ambition rest on secure foundations.
In an era defined by data, control over seabed infrastructure may prove as consequential as control over silicon. India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are already navigating this reality, recalibrating how power, infrastructure, and development intersect. Development is felt in wages, connected classrooms, and small businesses reaching markets.
If development is indeed freedom, as Amartya Sen reminds us, then the struggle over AI is ultimately about preserving the freedom to choose one’s developmental path. It is not merely about consuming someone else’s technological future but about shaping one’s own.
