AI and digital’s importance is driving locally based digital infrastructure and strategic onshoring

In his 2025 report ‘Rights, Wrongs & Returns’, Macquarie Capital’s Head of Global Desk Strategy, Viktor Shvets, noted that: ‘AI and its impact (both market and economic) will remain the main driving force of almost everything from labour markets and productivity to geopolitics for at least a decade to come’.11

This prediction is already playing out across Asia. Established markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China are seeking to expand their data centre footprint, while emerging markets including India, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam are developing them. All of this requires digital infrastructure, including battery energy storage systems, telecoms towers and fibre optic cables.

Lim highlights how Macquarie Asset Management was an early mover in the data centre sector when it invested in US-based Aligned Data Centres in 2018, and how that informed the subsequent acquisition of AirTrunk and its expansion across Asia-Pacific.

“We learned a lot from the US team and our ownership of Aligned and it helped us identify the opportunity in that sector here in this region,” she says.

Recognising the growing need to deliver essential digital services to communities across the region, Macquarie Asset Management identified strong investment fundamentals underpinning the data centre sector and its potential for rapid growth.

“We grew that business substantially by combining our local presence and global expertise, delivering strong returns that reflect the value we create and our ability to identify, invest in and nurture resilient digital infrastructure assets,” says Lim.

The business applies industry learnings across its digital ecosystem investments. These include Bersama Digital Infrastructure, a Southeast Asian digital infrastructure platform in which a Macquarie Asset Management-led consortium acquired a significant minority stake in 2022. Bersama is invested in a leading independent Indonesian telecom towers business with over 24,000 towers.12

AI-specific expertise is at a premium as governments across the region increasingly view digital infrastructure as a matter of national security, pushing for localised data storage, sovereign cloud frameworks, and tighter cybersecurity.

“There’s a huge push on self-sufficiency; governments understand they cannot rely on external parties for national security, so they want to be in charge of scaling up their technology supply chains,” says Lee. 

The growth of AI is also intensifying the link between digital infrastructure and energy systems, with AI set to drive a surge in energy demand from data centres around the world. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects electricity demand from data centres worldwide to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today.13