Recent weeks have been weeks of multi-billion investment announcements in the Southeast Asian region. After Microsoft announced investments in Indonesia and Malaysia, Amazon announced a $9 billion investment in Singapore to double the country's cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
The investment will be made over a period of four years which doubles the investment of Amazon Web Services in Singapore. This investment, according to AWS, is to meet customer needs and drive the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Southeast Asian region. It is also seen as another step to reduce dependence on China following increasingly strained trade relations with the United States.
The $9 billion investment Amazon announced today is part of Amazon's $35 billion investment outside the United States. AWS has already committed to investing $6 billion in Malaysia to develop AWS Region infrastructure by 2037.
The tense relationship between Beijing and Washington creates instability in the Asia Pacific region but at the same time it has a positive effect on ASEAN countries, especially in the AI, cloud computing and semiconductor industries.