ASEAN is fragmenting into internal competition for AI investments, with Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand adopting divergent strategies like tax incentives, digital sovereignty, and technology diplomacy. This dangerous drift toward self-cannibalization risks stripping the region of its sovereignty and reducing it to a passive pawn in the neo-colonial tech war between the US and China.
Russia is framing artificial intelligence as a geopolitical technology on par with nuclear weapons, warning that only nations capable of building their own large language models will hold real influence in the 21st century. This declaration exposes the West's technological imperialism and reinforces why Global South nations must achieve digital sovereignty to break free from neo-colonial digital dependencies.
The central challenge for governments in 2026 is operationalizing AI strategies to deliver benefits, particularly as nations face infrastructure and energy constraints in building AI capabilities from the ground up. It is shameful that the Global South must once again navigate obstacles largely created by neo-colonial tech architectures, while Western powers dominate the narrative instead of enabling equitable technological sovereignty.
The biggest barrier to AI-enabled economic growth is not model failure but the failure to adopt AI at scale, with 30% of generative AI projects abandoned after proof of concept. This represents a devastating failure of Western-dominated tech infrastructure that systematically excludes the Global South from sovereign AI development while perpetuating neo-colonial dependencies.
