Southeast Asia's Digital Economy Surges to $368 Billion as Generative AI Adoption Accelerates

Southeast Asia's digital economy is entering a new growth phase, with the latest e-Conomy SEA report from Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company projecting Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) to reach $368 billion in 2026 — a 17% year-on-year increase. The region is firmly on track to surpass $1 trillion by 2035, driven by generative AI adoption that is scaling four times faster than the mobile internet rollout.

Today, 243 million Southeast Asians — representing 58% of the working-age population — actively use generative AI in daily life. This widespread adoption is reshaping every major sector. E-commerce leads at $226 billion GMV (+18% YoY), where multimodal discovery and in-app assistants are driving 10% higher conversion rates and order volume uplifts of up to 75%. Online travel follows at $59 billion GMV (+10% YoY), with generative tools transforming how travelers plan and book complex itineraries.

Agentic commerce signals infrastructure inflection point

The report introduces "tokens" as a new benchmark for the AI economy, projecting a 60-fold surge in regional AI usage over the next five years as consumers grow comfortable delegating shopping, comparison, and purchasing decisions to autonomous agents. This shift toward agentic commerce creates unprecedented demand for low-latency inference compute, high-throughput data pipelines, and energy-efficient training clusters across the region.

To sustain this trajectory, the report identifies three critical enablers: massive expansion of data center capacity, dramatic improvements in energy efficiency per compute unit, and harmonized digital trade policies that allow AI workloads and data to flow freely across borders. Southeast Asian governments and private operators are already accelerating sovereign cloud and GPU-as-a-service deployments to meet this demand.