How APAC companies are rewiring their tech for the AI era
At Dell Technologies World, APAC tech leaders reveal how they are relying on hyperconverged infrastructure and digital sovereignty to shield themselves from supply chain shocks
As artificial intelligence (AI) deployments outgrow their experimental phase, Asia-Pacific organisations are now leaning on infrastructure standardisation and sovereign AI to scale globally and dodge supply chain bottlenecks.
Speaking at a media briefing on the sidelines of Dell Technologies World 2026 in Las Vegas, executives from Dell, Standard Chartered, and South Korean tech giant Naver Cloud discussed how the maturity of the AI cycle is reshaping datacentres across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
While Dell revealed that its AI factory customer base has surged from 3,000 to over 5,000 in the past year, beneath the rapid adoption of AI software and Nvidia-powered infrastructure lies a deeper need for resilient, highly commoditised infrastructure.
For Standard Chartered, operating across 54 global markets required the bank to redesign its private cloud infrastructure to achieve global scale and survive hardware shortages, according to its global head of infrastructure and operations John Sharratt.
The bank operates 52 country datacentres and four global datacentres as it looks to become a “super connector” for clients operating across borders. To manage the bank’s infrastructure footprint, Sharratt’s team eliminated all specialised hardware components in favour of a fully virtualised, hyper-converged environment, where the standard unit of scale is the server rack itself.
The strive for “simplicity, commodity, and scale” meant that all storage, networking, and security had to be hyperconverged. The bank eliminated standalone storage area networks (SANs) and physical firewall appliances. Instead, it relies on “boring” and interchangeable commodity hardware – specifically Dell servers and switches – housed within standard racks.
By avoiding highly specialised components, Standard Chartered has shielded itself from the worst of the industry’s supply chain shortages.
“If you have a very specialist design, you cannot substitute components if the NICs [network interface cards], memory or disks are not available,” Sharratt noted. “By eliminating that specialisation, we can literally roll a rack off the back of a lorry and have workloads running in just 24 hours.”
The bold move required navigating decades of technical debt, which is notoriously difficult to do in the financial services sector. Sharratt said the bank set up an architectural review board run by engineers to systematically refactor, virtualise, and scale every legacy application.
“There’s always lots of legacy in a banking environment. We have resolved all that legacy. There’s no physical server; it is all virtualised,” he said. “We are sitting in an extremely comfortable position as a bank to ride out the supply chain problems.”
Sharratt revealed that the bank’s estate in Asia, which accounts for 70% of its global infrastructure footprint, is already running on this new architecture, with the model currently being deployed in the UK. “This is not a story of what we’re going to do. This is a story of what we’ve done,” he added.
Infrastructure and models only matter if they solve real-world problems. Ultimately, what we want to create is unprecedented practical value that does not exist in the world today
Kim Yu-won, Naver Cloud
Naver Cloud takes sovereign AI global
While Standard Chartered focuses on standardising infrastructure, Naver Cloud is leveraging its massive domestic datacentre footprint to export sovereign AI capabilities globally.
Naver, South Korea’s leading IT portal and one of the few global search engines to successfully defend its home turf against Google, operates massive infrastructure, including the multi-megawatt Gak Sejong datacentre. Having built its own generative AI model, HyperCLOVA X, the company is now partnering with Dell and Nvidia to deploy AI factories tailored for digital sovereignty.
Kim Yu-won, CEO of Naver Cloud, noted that owning the full stack – from datacentres and graphics processing units (GPUs) to the underlying AI models – gives the company a unique advantage as governments and highly regulated industries look to protect their data.
“In a world where sovereignty is key, we are highly flexible in giving each customer specific security and governance,” Kim said. “We want to provide customers that prioritise sovereignty with a dedicated private cloud, and on top of that, we want to integrate with AI technology.”
Naver Cloud is already taking this strategy beyond Korea, partnering with Thailand’s Siam AI to develop a Thai large language model (LLM) and launching a joint venture in Saudi Arabia to build digital twin capabilities.
“Infrastructure and models only matter if they solve real-world problems,” Kim added. “Ultimately, what we want to create is unprecedented practical value that does not exist in the world today.”
Dell Technologies’ newly appointed leader for the APAC region, Richard McLaughlin, said helping customers navigate supply chain challenges and chart a path to becoming AI-driven companies remain his top priorities.
“The AI ecosystem is changing as it is being embraced and created by our customers in the AI economy,” McLaughlin said. “New business models, products, and services are emerging in the region as agentic frameworks become more commonplace. We’re seeing the region's enterprises accelerating, advancing, innovating, and entering agent lifecycle development at pace.”
He added that Dell is actively working with enterprise clients on “demand shaping” over the next four to five years to improve supply chain resilience, echoing Sharratt’s sentiment that disciplined infrastructure planning is critical.
“We believe that we have the supply chain advantage in the marketplace. We have over 40 years of relationships with suppliers to help de-risk the supply chain for our key customers,” McLaughlin noted.
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