AI surge could lift APAC data centre share to 34% by 2030

Mainland China is seen accounting for more than 70% of regional demand.

The Asia–Pacific (APAC) region could account for about 34% of global data centre demand by 2030 as local artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and enterprise digitisation drive regional demand, according to McKinsey research.

North America is expected to remain the largest market, accounting for about 46% of global demand by 2030. The region's workload mix is shifting from traditional compute, storage, and cloud towards a broader balance of AI and traditional workloads.

Traditional workloads accounted for more than 70% of APAC data centre demand in a McKinsey survey of hyperscalers and enterprises conducted in September 2025, whilst AI training and inference accounted for about 30%.

“Demand is increasingly emerging from local AI adoption and a broader enterprise digitisation cycle, especially in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and fintech, supporting a more durable demand mix, with roughly a 50-50 split between AI and traditional workloads by 2030,” the firm said.

The shift is attracting investment from both Western and Asian technology companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle committed more than $160b between January 2024 and May 2026 to build AI infrastructure in APAC, based on McKinsey research.

Alibaba announced in February 2025 that it would invest at least $52b in cloud and AI infrastructure globally over three years, whilst ByteDance may spend about $30b on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.

Mainland China is expected to remain APAC's largest market, accounting for more than 70% of regional demand by 2030, or about 58 gigawatts.

Outside China, growth is emerging across East and Southeast Asia (SEA), with new data centre corridors in Johor, Malaysia; Chonburi, Thailand; Jakarta, Indonesia; Mumbai, India; and Osaka, Japan.

“Demand is being shaped by both regional expansion from Western cloud providers (70% of hyperscaler demand), as well as deployments associated with Chinese cloud and platform companies (30% of hyperscaler demand),” McKinsey said.

AWS has invested $15.5b to expand its Osaka and Tokyo data centres. Alibaba has expanded its SEA footprint, including in Malaysia and the Philippines, whilst ByteDance is an anchor tenant at several data centre colocation facilities in SEA.

Sovereign AI strategies are also supporting demand. Singapore's National AI Strategy 2.0, updated in May 2026, targets AI adoption across government, enterprises, and priority sectors.

The Singapore government committed an additional $781.25m (SG$1b) over five years in January 2026 under its National AI Research and Development Plan.

Japan has launched ABCI 3.0 as a national sovereign AI supercomputer, backed by $226.10m (JPY36b).

In mainland China, localisation is extending across the data centre value chain, including cooling and power systems, servers, networking equipment, and AI chips.

Chinese companies already lead parts of the domestic value chain, with policy, capital, and supply chain resilience supporting further localisation. The market remains open to international capital and technology in selected areas.

McKinsey said some downstream segments continue to attract cross-border investment, whilst foreign companies can also compete in power modules, cooling systems, and electrical equipment where efficiency, reliability, and integration remain important.

For investors, McKinsey identified hyperscaler and colocation platforms as potential control points because they combine demand visibility, execution capabilities, and influence over vendors.

“At the same time, strategic investments across the equipment supply chain that are potential chokepoints—from power cooling, networking—have become an area of interest for investors,” the firm said.

McKinsey said APAC is becoming "a demand market in its own right," with local AI adoption, enterprise digitisation, sovereign strategies, and expansion by Eastern and Western technology companies shaping the region's next phase of data centre growth.

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