Industry Findings: ASEAN member states have moved toward harmonised AI governance and shared capacity-building to lower technical and regulatory barriers for cross-border deployments. The region released an ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics in Feb-2024 that provides practical risk templates and policy guidance for member economies, reducing fragmentation and encouraging common procurement guardrails for public-sector AI. This harmonisation drives demand for processors and platform bundles that can demonstrate provenance, privacy-enhancing capabilities and compatibility with regionally endorsed risk assessments. In the near term, ministries and multilateral agencies will prefer accelerators that ship with auditability features and support privacy-preserving inference; over the medium term, the Guide should enable pooled procurement initiatives and increase the market value of vendor toolchains that simplify certification across multiple ASEAN jurisdictions.
Industry Player Insights: ASEAN’s Regional momentum is led by Arm, MediaTek, ST Engineering, and Sea Limited etc. ST Engineering showcased over 20 AI solutions at InnoTech 2024 and expanded productised edge-AI offerings in Sep-2024, strengthening system integrator pipelines for governments and utilities. Sea Limited operationalised SEA AI Lab research outputs through localised language models and developer tooling in Apr-2024, accelerating adoption in e-commerce and fintech applications across Southeast Asia. Arm continued to refine Neoverse and mobile IP roadmaps in 2024 to support carrier and cloud-edge convergence, while MediaTek’s Dimensity family (May-2024) advanced on-device inference capabilities for OEMs in the region. These vendor moves increase the availability of validated stacks, reduce integration risk for ASEAN buyers, and accelerate pilot-to-production transitions for regionally relevant AI workloads.