Southeast Asia Digital Economy Heads for USD 368 Billion This Year
Southeast Asia's digital economy is on course for USD 368 billion in gross merchandise value this year, up 17% on the year before and tracking past USD 1 trillion within a decade, according to the eleventh e-Conomy SEA report from Google, Temasek and Bain & Company. The headline the authors push is adoption rather than spend. Generative AI use has reached 243 million people, or 58% of the working population, in under three years, a pace four times faster than the mobile internet managed.
The report introduces a new yardstick to argue that reach is not the same as depth. It counts AI usage in tokens and puts regional consumption at 5 to 7 quadrillion tokens per capita, roughly a tenth of American levels. Consumers account for about 60% of that volume, mostly for everyday work and study tasks, while enterprise workloads run strongest in Singapore and Malaysia, where they make up 45% to 60% of usage.
And the authors read the gap as headroom rather than failure. They project AI usage could rise by as much as sixty times by the end of the decade, as people move from single queries to handing longer tasks to agents. Florian Hoppe, a partner at Bain, said the story is shifting from how many people use AI to how deeply they use it, and noted that most users remain on free tiers.
Agentic commerce is the use case the report expects to arrive first. Three quarters of consumers say they would let an agent find the best price and complete a purchase on their behalf, and 72% already lean on everyday automations. Trust is rising with them, with 62% saying they trust AI more than they did a year earlier.
But the same findings come with conditions attached. Privacy protections are demanded by 44% of consumers, and 30% want the ability to undo an action an agent takes on their behalf. The report calls this pragmatic optimism, a willingness to delegate that stops short of blind faith, and it treats the caveats as the price of monetising the behaviour.
But capital shows a similar concentration. Private funding for digital applications has settled at about USD 8 billion a year, and companies with AI in their core products took 80% of deal value in the last six months, up from 30% two years ago. Infrastructure drew USD 20 billion over the past year, led by an USD 11 billion deal for ST Telemedia's data centres.
The sector numbers behind the total are uneven. E-commerce remains the engine at USD 226 billion, up 18%, while online travel reaches USD 59 billion and mobility and food delivery USD 40 billion. Online media is the fastest grower at USD 44 billion in revenue, up 22%, and digital financial services carry USD 1.65 trillion in gross transaction value with lending balances up 22%.
So the report's case for what comes next rests on infrastructure and cost. It says meeting projected demand needs roughly triple the data centre capacity within five years, backed by energy rules such as Singapore's power usage requirements and Malaysia's corporate renewable energy scheme. Falling inference costs are the other condition, since cheaper tokens are what would move free users onto paid tiers.
So Singapore gets a chapter of its own. Its digital economy is put at USD 31 billion this year, up 8%, on a path to USD 59 billion, with Generative AI reaching 70% of the working population, or 3.2 million people. The country added 200 megawatts of green energy to a 1.4 gigawatt compute base, and most of the region's AI infrastructure funding has gone to platforms headquartered there.
One caveat belongs with all of it. The report is published by the three firms that commissioned it, and the release gives no sample size, fieldwork period or method for the consumer survey behind those percentages. The projections to the end of the decade are the authors' own modelling, not observed outcomes.
Southeast Asia's digital economy is projected at USD 368 billion in gross merchandise value this year, up 17%.
The report puts Generative AI use at 243 million people, 58% of the working population.
Regional AI usage sits at a tenth of American levels, which the authors read as room to grow.
Three quarters of consumers would let an agent find a price and buy for them.
The report is published by Google, Temasek and Bain, and no survey method or sample size was disclosed.
