Southeast Asia’s growth next year will be decided at meetings its finance ministers won’t attend.
A few executives in California will soon settle next year’s spending on data centers. Their decisions will do more to shape growth in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines than any budget those governments pass.
The World Bank has just raised its forecast for the region, and the factories, skills and supply chains behind it are genuine achievements. Yet AI-related goods account for more than 70% of export growth in those four economies, while growth in other exports is weak or negative.
Six of the region’s economies shipped $1.4 trillion of AI hardware in 12 months. Nearly all of it feeds an investment wave led by a handful of American tech giants, equal to about 6% of US gross domestic product (GDP).
Their capital spending plans have become Asia’s export order book. After the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, regional governments spent a generation making sure no outsider could again dictate the region’s fortunes.
They built vast reserves, deepened local bond markets and chased customers on every continent to diversify their export bases.
In 1997, the threat came from hot money spread across thousands of funds. Today it rests with the purchasing teams of perhaps five US tech companies.
These companies answer to shareholders in New York, and shareholders eventually ask when a spending boom will pay for itself. When they do, the cuts will land first on suppliers abroad.
Trimming an order from a foreign supplier costs no American jobs and angers no American voters. It is the easiest saving a chief executive can find.
In South Korea, exports jumped 83.5% in September to a record $120.9 billion, half of it chips. Two chipmakers account for 43% of the Kospi’s value. The country’s trade figures and its main stock market now move largely with investment decisions made on another continent.
Central banks across the region will likely set interest rates on forecasts that hinge on Silicon Valley’s corporate guidance, a first.
Finance ministries will plan budgets around export revenue that assumes capital spending keeps rising. Currencies strengthen on chip earnings and squeeze every exporter selling anything else.
Ministers drafting next year’s budgets are, in effect, forecasting the mood of boardrooms they can’t see inside.
Asian governments can’t meaningfully tax these companies, regulate them or vote them out. The World Bank says the cycle is still gaining speed, and each quarter of growth raises the drop the region faces if spending turns.
Yet American capital can’t build a single data center without servers, chips and components from Asian plants.
Few places can match the region’s mix of skilled labor, supplier networks and manufacturing scale and replicating it elsewhere would take a decade. And Asia holds far more bargaining power than it uses.
Instead, governments compete for every new plant, offering tax breaks and subsidies in a bidding war that favors buyers. Each country negotiates alone and cedes a little more pricing power with every deal.
If the region bargained as a bloc, coordinated incentives would end the undercutting, and shared standards on energy, water and land use would set terms that buyers must meet.
More homegrown demand, from regional data centers to governments buying AI services for their citizens, would keep more of what Asian factories make inside Asia.
The region spent 25 years making sure its growth couldn’t be switched off from the outside. Those protections are worth rebuilding now, while the orders still flow.
Nigel Green is founder and CEo of the de Vere Group
