China's infrastructure edge may shape Southeast Asia's AI choices, ASPI analyst says
China is positioning itself as a key provider of the infrastructure behind Southeast Asia's AI ambitions, according to Gatra Priyandita, a senior analyst at ASPI. In an opinion piece for The Strategist, he argues that the advantage lies less in better models than in the equipment and relationships through which AI services are delivered.
- ASPI analyst Gatra Priyandita says Chinese firms are embedding AI in telecoms, cloud and critical infrastructure across Southeast Asia.
- Guangxi officials report 44 AI cooperation agreements with ASEAN countries; the Laos power-sector model keeps computing in China.
- Organisers of the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo reported nearly 100 preliminary agreements worth around US$150 million.
- The author argues the key issue is who can audit, maintain, modify and replace the technology, not who owns it.
- ASEAN's Digital Economy Framework Agreement and Malaysia's sovereign computing decisions are named as upcoming tests.
AI arriving through telecoms and cloud contracts
Priyandita writes that Chinese companies are embedding AI into telecommunications networks, cloud services and critical infrastructure across the region. As governments and businesses adopt these technologies, he warns, they risk developing dependencies that could become increasingly difficult to reverse.
He notes that none of this requires a standalone decision to buy Chinese models. AI can arrive through a telecommunications contract, a cloud agreement or a software upgrade. In his words, each may make commercial sense, but together they deepen reliance on one ecosystem.
Huawei, he says, has long worked with operators from Thailand to Brunei, and AI is introduced as an extension of those relationships. At Mobile World Congress 2026, Huawei and Indonesian telecommunications company Telkomsel announced an agreement combining Indonesian 5G and broadband upgrades with embedded AI. Telkomsel also expanded its cooperation with ZTE on AI-native networks. Tencent has outlined further data-centre investment in Indonesia, and ByteDance's TikTok has secured approval to expand data infrastructure in Thailand.
A more organised state-level push
The author describes China's approach as having become more organised. The first ministerial roundtable on AI between China and ASEAN took place in September 2025 and led to the launch of the China-ASEAN AI Application Cooperation Centre in Nanning, Guangxi. A second meeting in September 2026 brought together representatives from all 11 ASEAN members.
Guangxi provincial officials report 44 AI cooperation agreements with ASEAN countries and joint large-model research with eight. At the fourth China-ASEAN AI Cooperation Forum on 16 September, organisers unveiled five outputs, including a Lao-language model for Laos's state electricity corporation. Chinese officials described it as their first overseas AI project in the power sector.
Priyandita calls the delivery model more revealing: computing power stays in Guangxi while services are exported. Laos gets a locally adapted application, but the infrastructure behind it remains in China. The financial scale is modest so far. Organisers of the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo reported nearly 100 preliminary agreements worth around US$150 million (A$210 million).
Open models and the limits of model-level sovereignty
Open-weight models reinforce the trend, the article says. DeepSeek showed that capable models could be offered at low cost, and Alibaba's Qwen has become an important foundation for development beyond China. In May, Singapore released Sea-lion v4.5, a collection of large language models optimised for Southeast Asia, which included models adopted from China's Qwen and Gemma. Priyandita says this reflects how Chinese models have entered the wider ecosystem, rather than Singapore falling under Chinese influence.
But he argues that sovereignty at the model layer does not mean independence across technologies. A government may replace its model while remaining dependent on particular chips, cloud infrastructure or technical support.
Malaysia illustrates the complications. At the May 2025 launch of a private sector AI-infrastructure initiative, Deputy Communications Minister Teo Nie Ching described plans involving Huawei's Ascend AI hardware and DeepSeek. Within two days, the trade ministry distanced the government from the plan, saying it had not been developed, endorsed or coordinated by the government. Huawei said it had not sold Ascend chips in Malaysia.
What to watch
The author cautions that these risks should not be overstated, since Chinese suppliers offer advantages in cost and delivery. The more immediate concern, he says, is dependencies that governments cannot easily assess or reverse. An operator reliant on proprietary AI network management faces switching costs, and utilities using externally hosted models will have limited understanding of how they are updated or secured. The key question, in his view, is who can audit, maintain, modify and replace a technology, rather than who owns it.
He also points to China's reach into AI governance: five ASEAN members are among the founding signatories of the Shanghai-based World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation.
Two developments will test regional choices, according to the piece. ASEAN concluded negotiations on its Digital Economy Framework Agreement in May, and its implementation will shape cross-border data flows and digital trade. Malaysia's sovereign computing decisions offer a more immediate test of how governments balance Chinese technology against US restrictions.
Governments may believe they are keeping options open by avoiding an explicit choice between Chinese and Western AI, Priyandita writes, but the most consequential choices may already be happening in other areas of the technology. The piece is an opinion article, and the views are the author's, not ASPI's.
ASPI Strategist (AI): China’s infrastructure advantage could shape Southeast Asia’s AI choices
