This article examines Southeast Asia’s structural position within the global AI economy, interrogating the gap between techno-optimist narratives and the material conditions of the region’s digital transformation. As part of the broader Global South, Southeast Asia remains structurally peripheral despite attracting over US$80 billion in AI and infrastructure investment, deploying large language models, computer vision, and predictive analytics at scale across public and private sectors, and developing national AI strategies and data governance frameworks: a net consumer of foreign-owned computational infrastructure, a supplier of raw data and cheap labor, and a market for proprietary foundational models. Drawing on classical political economy and dependency theory, the article argues this outcome reflects the structural operation of unequal technological exchange rather than developmental lag, a condition shared across the Global South. Regional governance instruments, including ASEAN data protection frameworks and national AI ethics guidelines, are analyzed as a ‘technological sovereignty simulacrum’: administratively functional but materially hollow. The article concludes that China’s emergence as a full-spectrum techno-scientific power, commanding indigenous semiconductor architecture, mineral processing capacity, and state-directed digital infrastructure, represents a substantive challenge to AI corporate and state hegemony, and opens renewed possibilities for alternative techno-scientific trajectories across the Global South.
Read Original Publication Here ➜
