Southeast Asia's total digital sales volume is expected to increase by 17 per cent to $368 billion in 2026, according to the annual e-Conomy SEA 2026 report by Google, consulting firm Bain & Company and state investor Temasek, Reuters reported from Singapore on Wednesday.

Yaani: $368 billion means about $0.37 trillion of goods and services sold through digital platforms in one year — and the report's 2035 figure of $1.14 trillion means more than 1,140 billion dollars a year if growth continues at about 13 per cent annually, Reuters said. The report's authors said there was still "substantial headroom" for growth.

Generative AI has become a part of daily life in the region: 243 million Southeast Asians — 58 per cent of the working population — now use it, scaling four times faster than the mobile internet did, Google said in its summary of the report, titled 'Building the Intelligent Economy'. Temasek, in its release of the same report, gave the same 243 million and 58 per cent figures.

Measured in AI tokens, however, the region still lags: Southeast Asia consumed about 5 million AI tokens per capita, compared with 60 million in the United States and 14 million in Europe, Reuters reported from the study. The report projected regional AI usage could surge by up to 60-fold by 2030 as people move from simple searches to delegating complex tasks to AI agents.

Funding told a two-part story. In 2025 there were 421 private funding deals for digital-economy companies in Southeast Asia, down 28.4 per cent from a year earlier, and the region attracted $11 billion in funding for the whole of 2025, Reuters said. But in the first half of 2026 it drew $21 billion — yaani nearly double the entire previous year — largely on two large data centre deals, an $11 billion deal involving STT GDC and a $5 billion deal involving DayOne, the report said.

Built data centre capacity rose to 5.8 gigawatts by the first half of 2026, from 4 gigawatts at the end of 2025, as the region builds computing infrastructure for AI workloads. Total IPO proceeds in Southeast Asia climbed to $8.5 billion in the 12 months ended June 30, 2026 — more than double the $3.6 billion in the prior period — driven by listing activity in Singapore and Malaysia, Reuters reported.

Sources: Reuters (Singapore, Oct 21); Google — 'Southeast Asia digital economy to hit $1 trillion by 2035' (Oct 21); Temasek release of the e-Conomy SEA 2026 report (Oct 21).