Sourced records of Chinese AI deployments across the Global South and the Middle East

Add the precise opening date: the third data center was launched on 1 July 2025 (Alizila, 2025-07-09); the second data center in the Philippines is planned to enter service in October 2025.

On 13 August 2025, on the opening day of the ASEAN AI Summit 2025 in Kuala Lumpur, Huawei Cloud held the Huawei Cloud AI Ecosystem Summit APAC. Huawei Malaysia announced, with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in attendance, a three-year commitment to train 30,000 Malaysian AI professionals and cultivate 200 local AI partners — a forward-looking pledge, not work already delivered. Huawei Cloud additionally lists a Kuala Lumpur region code (AP-Kuala Lumpur-OP6 / my-kualalumpur-1) in its own SDK region table; no third-party source located to date confirms an operating local node.

Zhipu AI helped Malaysia build a national-level sovereign large-model MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) platform and establish the national sovereign AI talent-development laboratory Z-UM AI Lab. The platform is built on Z.ai's open-source foundation models, optimized for a multilingual environment spanning Malay, English, and Chinese as well as local culture, and adopts a sovereignty-centered data security architecture, empowering use cases in government affairs, enterprise, research, and education. It has been described as the first substantive overseas case of a Chinese company delivering a national-level sovereign large model.

Huawei Cloud operates data centres in Thailand and cooperates with the public sector: it announced in November 2020 the construction of a third Thailand data centre for approximately THB 700 million (approximately USD 23 million), with launch planned for 2021, and signed an MoU with Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES) in December 2023; work with the Thai Meteorological Department covers weather-forecasting models.

J&T Express announced in March 2025 that the DeepSeek model would be applied to sorting centres and customer service; in November 2025 it commissioned Thailand's first AI-recognition-plus-automatic-scanning-camera sorting system at the Wang Thonglang sorting centre in Bangkok (60 additional sorting lanes; sorting capacity for the same period increased by over 100% versus the original system), with plans to expand to other centres in 2026.

Huawei and Siriraj Hospital (Faculty of Medicine, Mahidol University) launched a 5G + AI smart-hospital project on 16 December 2021, implementing nine sub-projects including a 5G+AI pathology diagnosis system; verified components include a 5G portable medical kit, a 5G unmanned vehicle, a 5G medical cart, a 5G smart hospital bed, MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), and hybrid cloud.

Tencent Cloud opened its SECOND internet data centre in Thailand in Bangkok in June 2021 (announced alongside Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo), a Tier-3 facility with GPU support offering AI, IoT, facial recognition, OCR and Live Video Broadcasting (LVB); as of January 2023 it operated two high-performance data centres in Thailand serving local enterprises and government. Its Thai market entry predates this: Tencent Cloud has been distributed and co-delivered in Thailand by True IDC (True Corporation's data-centre arm) since at least April 2019, and True IDC's current Tencent Cloud service page markets in-country data residency (PDPA), facial recognition and digital identity verification, intelligent virtual humans, enterprise LLM knowledge management, AI image/video generation, and CDN across 2,800+ global nodes, with Thai-baht billing and Thai engineer support.

Alibaba Cloud launched Thailand's first local data centre on 12 May 2022, obtaining ISO27001/ISO20000 certification and complying with Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT)'s financial regulatory guidelines; in early 2025 it launched a second data centre, bringing a richer generative AI product portfolio and industry-specific solutions to address local GenAI demand, and building a local ecosystem together with more than 40 partners, including National Telecom and True IDC, through the Partner Alliance 100 partner programme.

SenseTime has established generative AI in Thailand through a partnership model: in March 2023, it signed an MoU with T&B Media Global to participate in building Translucia, Thailand's first virtual world, covering areas such as smart cities and the metaverse; in July 2024, Thailand's DTGO Group (parent company of the property developer MQDC) and SenseTime, based on SenseNova (Rixin) 5.5, launched DTLM, a trilingual Thai-Chinese-English large language model, described as the world's first efficient trilingual model, providing enterprise customers with low-cost, localized generative AI that incorporates a digital trust framework, exclusively distributed by DTGO's subsidiary Quinnnova.

ByteDance/TikTok's data-centre investment in Thailand, promoted through the Thailand Board of Investment. Helena Lersch, TikTok's Global Vice President of Public Policy, disclosed a five-year, USD 8.8 billion data-centre investment plan for Thailand in Bangkok on 28 February 2025 (Reuters); it is unclear whether this includes an earlier USD 3.76 billion project. The expansion entity is TikTok System (Thailand) Co., Ltd.

Top10VPN mapping of 6.3 million Hikvision/Dahua IP-camera networks across 191 countries outside China (Shodan scans, Sept 2021) found Vietnam has the largest share of any country outside China (13%, ahead of the US at 11%), with Ho Chi Minh City ranked first and Hanoi second among world cities. Hikvision devices carry facial-recognition, licence-plate and behaviour-analysis capabilities.

Attribute Decree 147/2024 to the ITIF source, not Tech Policy Press. Confirmed by the cited source: Vietnam's MIC probed TikTok in 2023 and TikTok signed an admission of wrongdoing pledging corrective action; in January 2026 Vietnam's Competition Commission fined TikTok 880 million dong (US$33,800) for violating data consent rules. Downgrade the other listed violation specifics to 'per Bloomberg reporting (not independently verified in this round)'.

Add explicit status flag: as of August 2026, there is no public confirmation of groundbreaking, site selection, or commissioning for this self-built data centre; it remains at the planning stage.

Indonesian consumer-fintech group founded in 2016 by Chinese founders William Li (CEO) and Gordon Hu (CTO); its predecessor Silvrr began in Hong Kong in 2014 providing cross-border remittances for domestic workers. Business spans instalment consumer credit, wealth management and digital banking. The company states that all business operations rely on algorithms and AI, covering account transfers, KYC, risk assessment, anti-fraud and anti-money laundering, with R&D investment exceeding USD 28 million a year (CEO statement, KrASIA, 2 July 2020) — this AI/algorithm attribution rests solely on the founder's own account and has no third-party corroboration. In 2019 Akulaku bought an 8.9% stake in Indonesian commercial bank PT Bank Yudha Bhakti (BBYB) from Gozco Capital for Rp 158 billion, becoming a minority shareholder and committing to staged investment totalling up to Rp 500 billion; the bank was renamed PT Bank Neo Commerce Tbk in 2020. The founder's claimed Ping An Insurance background is removed from the description because its only source is dead (see notes).

In March 2018, Alibaba Cloud's Jakarta data centre began operations, making it the first international public cloud service provider to operate locally in Indonesia; it subsequently added a second and third data centre in 2019 and 2021 respectively, providing local enterprises — particularly micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and startups — with cloud and AI services including elastic computing, databases, machine learning and data analytics.

As a technology and strategic partner, Ant Group has exported to DANA — the Indonesian e-wallet controlled by Emtek and launched in 2018 — system architecture derived from Alipay, the OceanBase distributed database, and credit-scoring technology, supporting close to 200 million registered users, DANA Paylater credit, and QRIS cross-border payments (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand); in 2023 the two parties jointly launched the SisBerdaya programme to empower women entrepreneurs.

Hikvision operates in Indonesia through a local entity (with a Country Manager) and its distribution partner PT Pasifik Teknologi Indonesia; in 2018 it launched an AI-based smart-city solution in Jakarta covering object detection, facial recognition, automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) and pedestrian-flow counting, and states that it has participated in smart-city development in cities including Jakarta, Tangerang and Surabaya. According to trade media, it also developed a customised AIoT traffic-violation enforcement solution for the Indonesian traffic police.

In 2020, Kuaishou launched SnackVideo, its overseas short-video app, in Indonesia, adopting an inclusive recommendation algorithm; the company states that content distribution does not discriminate on the basis of user identity or popularity. Following its Hong Kong IPO in February 2021, it stepped up investment in the Indonesian market; according to data released by Ipsos, SnackVideo had approximately 43 million monthly active users in Indonesia in 2022, making it the country's second-largest short-video platform, and it operates SnackVideo's local advertising and creator ecosystem (Native Ads/Live Streaming Ads/SOLO/CID).

Tencent Cloud launched its first Jakarta data centre in April 2021, with initial customers including Bank Neo Commerce and JOOX; its third data centre came online in 2025, alongside an announced investment of approximately USD 500 million in Indonesia by 2030. Since September 2024 it has partnered with the GoTo Group to migrate GoTo's on-demand services system into the local data centre, emphasising data sovereignty and localised compliance while supporting local enterprise AI applications.

Huawei Cloud's Jakarta Region, comprising three availability zones, went into operation in 2022, and a fourth availability zone was announced for addition in 2026. It has opened up its full-stack AI capabilities (including ModelArts, the Versatile agent platform, and others), and together with local partners launched the 'Indonesia Government-Enterprise AI Partnership Alliance,' signing talent cooperation agreements with more than 100 universities and over 20 government departments, and has cumulatively trained more than 100,000 digital talents, positioning itself to build an 'ASEAN AI Engine.'