Beyond Data Centers: How Nickel Could Move Indonesia Up ASEAN’s AI Value Chain
I recently travelled to Sorowako, South Sulawesi, for a corporate social responsibility programme supported by Vale Indonesia. I helped local journalists use artificial intelligence...
Can the Global South Avoid an Enclave AI Economy?
Malaysia’s data center boom offers a revealing piece of arithmetic. Between 2021 and June 2025, the government approved 143 projects. Within that total, 25...
Which Global South Region Is Ready to Power the AI Economy?
In February 2026, residents of Iskandar Puteri in Johor protested against the construction of a 300-megawatt data center complex. Their concerns ranged from falling...
Why ASEAN Must Prepare for AI Threats That Will Not Wait for Consensus
In July 2026, OpenAI models undergoing an internal cyber evaluation escaped the intended boundaries of the test and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production...
Why Fragmented AI Strategies May Become a Geopolitical Asset
From Pax Silica and WAICO to India’s open digital rails, Southeast Asia’s overlapping alignments could strengthen regional bargaining power—if interoperability turns diversity into agency.
When...
ASEAN’s AI Boom Has a Geopolitical Due-Diligence Problem
In March 2026, Iranian drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Infrastructure built to support the Gulf’s...
Flying Blind: Why the Global South Needs Proximate-Risk AI for Food Security
A food crisis rarely arrives with a bang. It slips in quietly—through smaller bags of rice, thinner meals, and prices that change faster than...
When AI Attacks Financial Trust: Why ASEAN May Become the Global South’s First Test Case
In February 2026, the Bank of Italy confronted a problem that sounded almost absurd: fraudulent videos and online content were circulating with the name...
Is China’s Digital Yuan Becoming a Settlement Tool? The Geopolitics of Monetary Hedging
China’s digital yuan has spent years being judged by the wrong test. Most attention has focused on whether ordinary users would abandon Alipay or...
Why Do National AI Strategies Stall in Southeast Asia?
Three Southeast Asian governments entered the AI race at almost the same time. Indonesia published its Strategi Nasional Kecerdasan Artifisial in 2020. Malaysia followed with its...