Ayesha - stock.adobe.com
How sovereign AI will reshape APAC’s digital future
Asia-Pacific countries are developing sovereign AI capabilities to address unique cultural, economic, security and data sovereignty needs of the region
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a national imperative. Country leaders are grappling with questions over AI’s impact on their culture, economic goals and even national security. If recent developments are any indication, the time is right for Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries to take concrete steps towards finding definitive answers.
There have been a raft of new AI models released, including indigenous models as well as open-source and lower-cost options. This ignited discussions about the democratisation of AI among world leaders at Davos 2025.
APAC organisations have also committed more capital to AI development. According to a recent report by IDC, the region’s AI investments are expected to reach $110bn by 2026.
Meanwhile, data sovereignty is becoming a growing priority in the region. One-third of Asia’s governments plan to adopt sovereign cloud services by 2026. More than three-quarters (77%) of APAC’s enterprises are already adapting data strategies to comply with local data sovereignty laws.
The convergence of data sovereignty priorities, increased investment, and AI’s growing democratisation is driving APAC countries to claim greater ownership over their AI capabilities. This ambition is best realised through sovereign AI, where a nation creates a proprietary AI to meet its specific data privacy, sovereignty and socioeconomic needs.
Path towards localisation and security
As sovereign AI is built on a country’s unique culture, history, and sociological nuances, its outputs can be tailored to local specific needs. For example, countries like Thailand and Vietnam are already building AI infrastructure to harness data that could improve healthcare outcomes or produce cleaner energy in their countries.
Sovereign AI can also speak “the same language” as the country it’s in. This is especially important in APAC, which is home to more than 3.000 documented languages. Multilingual Singapore is building a National Multimodal LLM Programme to manage context switches between different languages. Indonesia has Sahabat AI, which provides citizens with a large language model tailored to the local language.
With APAC organisations trying to close the gap in their data governance capabilities, sovereign AI offers another important benefit. It enhances data privacy and security within a nation’s borders, allowing countries to control every aspect of their home-grown AI models, including their data usage and infrastructure.
The building blocks of sovereign AI
The benefits of sovereign AI are clear, but countries must invest in a few building blocks to support these ambitions.
First, countries must build a network of local digital infrastructure that supports high-density computing and advanced connectivity. Indonesia offers a glimpse of what this could look like – Digital Realty Bersama, a joint venture between Bersama Digital Infrastructure Asia (BDIA) and Digital Realty, offers a network of datacentres with localised operational knowledge, high computing capacity, and robust connectivity capabilities to Indonesia’s businesses today.
Due to AI’s significant power and cooling needs, sovereign AI also requires infrastructure designed to maximise energy efficiency. Local guidelines, such as Singapore’s green datacentre roadmap provide a strong blueprint for how the industry can deliver this.
A local workforce equipped with AI development and management skills is also required. This is achieved through scaling up AI education and training, which is a key pillar of AI strategies in the region such as the AI Thailand programme.
Countries also need to establish governance for AI oversight, leadership, management, and accountability as the final building blocks. Regulatory frameworks should be established to cover critical processes, such as data collection and usage, how AI models are trained, transparency into data privacy, as well as address the technology’s many ethical questions.
Sovereign AI: A challenge worth pursuing
Sovereign AI may be new to APAC, but recent developments have created the perfect opportunity to intensify national efforts towards developing it.
It remains to be seen if countries will build the workforce, infrastructure and regulation for sovereign AI purely through their governments, work with private companies to back independent research, or pursue a hybrid of both.
However, what’s clear is that the enormous amount of effort and investments put into sovereign AI’s evolution will benefit AI advancements in both the public and private sectors for years to come.
Serene Nah is managing director and head of APAC at Digital Realty
