Where the math is defensible.
Long-form research on live enterprise decisions. Publication is selective. Every number traces to a named source. No takes without evidence.
ASEAN Sovereign AI in 2026: Models, Compute, and the Regulatory Patchwork
Singapore is buying TPU access while building SEA-LION, Indonesia is shipping Sahabat-AI in five languages, Thailand is scaling Typhoon, Malaysia is funding chips, Vietnam is exporting PhoGPT, and Manila has finally passed an AI Act, but the United States Diffusion Rule and a fragmented data sovereignty regime put a ceiling on the regional ambition.
Across 2025 and into 2026, every large ASEAN economy moved from announcement to delivery on sovereign artificial intelligence. Singapore is executing the December 2023 National AI Strategy 2.0 (NAIS 2.0) under AI Singapore (AISG), with the SEA-LION family now in its third generation and a S$1 billion Strategic AI Compute fund underwriting...
ASEAN 2026: Tariff Whiplash, FDI Surge, and the Vietnam Malaysia Thailand Indonesia Quartet
The April 2025 reciprocal tariff schedule, the 90 day pause, and the bilateral negotiation track have rewritten the China plus one playbook. Capital is still moving, but the geography of advantage has narrowed around four ASEAN economies whose tariff exposure, FDI flows, and cluster maturity diverge sharply.
On April 2, 2025 the United States set country specific reciprocal tariffs that put Vietnam at 46 percent, Cambodia at 49 percent, Thailand at 36 percent, Indonesia at 32 percent, Malaysia at 24 percent, the Philippines at 17 percent, and Singapore at 10 percent. A 90 day pause one week later replaced the schedule with a 10 percent univer...
Johor's Data Center Boom: Singapore's Spillover and Malaysia's Grid Bet
Singapore's moratorium pushed roughly 1.6 GW of latent demand across the causeway, and Johor is now Southeast Asia's most concentrated hyperscaler buildout. The binding constraints are grid, water, and sovereign data law.
Between Singapore's 2019 moratorium and the partial 2022 reopening under the Pilot Call for Application, roughly 1 to 2 GW of regional hyperscaler demand had no clean home. Johor absorbed most of it. Sedenak Tech Park, Iskandar Puteri, Kulai, and Pengerang now host announced commitments from Microsoft, AWS, Google, ByteDance, Equinix, GDS...
Vietnam's 14th Party Congress: To Lam, Bamboo Diplomacy, and the Pricing of Political Continuity
The January 2027 14th National Congress will ratify a leadership transition already executed under fire. Investors should price To Lam's consolidation, the Blazing Furnace's reach into the Politburo, and a 22 to 17 ministry restructuring as one integrated macro signal.
Nguyen Phu Trong's death on 19 July 2024 ended the longest General Secretaryship since reunification and triggered the most compressed succession in Vietnamese Communist Party history. By 3 August 2024 To Lam, the Minister of Public Security who had run the Blazing Furnace anti-corruption campaign, held the General Secretaryship outright....
Vietnam's Bamboo Diplomacy at Scale: Spratlys Reclamation, Strategic Partnerships, and the 2026 Balance
Vietnam reclaimed roughly 770 acres in the Spratlys between December 2022 and December 2024, second only to China, while upgrading comprehensive strategic partnerships with the United States, Japan, Australia, and France. The bamboo diplomacy doctrine is being stress tested by procurement diversification and the Hanoi-Beijing balance.
Vietnam now operates the second largest island-building program in the South China Sea, with the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) at CSIS documenting roughly 770 acres of new land created across ten Spratly features between December 2022 and December 2024, and continued deepening through 2025 at Barque Canada Reef, Pearson Ree...