Southeast Asia’s high-capacity connectivity market is set to grow faster than the global average as AI data centre investment accelerates, according to Ciena, which briefed media on the region’s infrastructure boom alongside Malaysian carrier TM Global.

Global revenue from high-capacity connectivity services is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 18 percent from 2025 to 2030, Ciena said, with Southeast Asia expected to outpace that with annual growth of 22 percent over the same period. The company pointed to three sources of demand: investment by hyperscale and AI-focused cloud providers, the increasing geographic distribution of data centres, and enterprise AI adoption straining existing networks.

Neoscaler spending could push AI investment past US$1 trillion

Ciena said AWS, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft are expected to invest a combined US$600 billion in new data centres in 2026. Once spending by “neoscalers” – smaller cloud providers specialising in AI computing – is included, total AI infrastructure investment could exceed US$1 trillion. The company said this trend is already visible in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, as data sovereignty rules and latency requirements push facilities closer to users.

“We believe that service providers who are well-prepared to take advantage of these opportunities will unlock this new revenue growth curve…by enabling this AI ecosystem,” said Francisco Sant’Anna, senior adviser for market intelligence at Ciena.

AI workloads demand more than added bandwidth

Alex Wong, Ciena’s regional managing director for ASEAN, Hong Kong and Taiwan, said Southeast Asia has the land, power, water, fibre infrastructure and cross-border links needed to support AI, alongside continuing investment and a developing regulatory environment.

“AI workloads are much more dynamic, much more sensitive to latency, and the infrastructure is becoming more distributed, so operators have to think beyond simply adding more bandwidth. An AI operator is one that can deliver more than basic connectivity. That is what separates an AI-ready network from a traditional one,” Wong said.

TM Global, the wholesale arm of Telekom Malaysia, is deploying Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme technology to handle rising traffic driven by AI, cloud adoption and digital transformation across the Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand corridor, reinforcing its position as a wholesale gateway into the region.