Industry Findings: Regional momentum for scalable AI compute has sharpened as Asia Pacific economies coordinate on digital trade, data flows and investments that underpin cross-border model development. A notable regional event appeared when APEC leaders reaffirmed digital and AI transformation priorities in Nov-2024, signalling renewed commitments to connectivity, skills and interoperable infrastructure. That collective stance reduces policy fragmentation risk for multinational buyers and increases expectations that suppliers will offer geographically distributed, latency-aware accelerator options. Short term, cloud and telco buyers will demand processors optimised for mixed workloads—on-device inference, edge aggregation and hyperscale training—so vendors must demonstrate multi-node orchestration and energy-aware scaling. Over time, the region will reward processor suppliers that combine fabric-level integration, regional availability and clear statements on energy and supply resilience, accelerating procurement of heterogeneous stacks tuned to local latency and sovereign constraints.
Industry Player Insights: The region’s industry momentum is led by Huawei, Samsung, MediaTek, and Inspur etc. MediaTek expanded its on-device generative AI roadmap with the Dimensity 9300+ in May-2024, raising expectations for phone-level LLM inference and driving OEMs to re-evaluate on-device vs cloud split decisions. Samsung pushed mobile AI into mainstream consumer deployments via Galaxy AI features and Exynos roadmap advances announced at Galaxy Unpacked in Jan-2024, which influenced telco and device OEM acceleration requirements. Huawei continued to scale Ascend-enabled cloud services across APAC through 2024, offering an alternative integrated stack for enterprises that prefer regional cloud-native compute. Inspur accelerated availability of AI-optimised servers and system integration services across APAC in 2024, improving procurement options for hyperscalers and large enterprises. Together, these developments broaden supplier choice, sharpen price-performance segmentation and compel buyers to specify software compatibility and regional availability when selecting accelerators.