Southeast Asia’s $300 Billion Digital Economy Enters the ‘AI Reality’

When Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company launched their first e-Conomy SEA report a decade ago, a $200 billion regional digital economy by 2025 was considered an aggressive call. The 2025 edition — the tenth — confirms the region cleared…

Indonesia’s Energy Transition at a Crossroads: Inside the RUPTL 2025–2034

Indonesia enters 2026 holding two facts that sit uneasily together. The first is ambition: a new Electricity Supply Business Plan (RUPTL 2025–2034) that calls for 42.6 GW of new renewable capacity over the decade. The second is the starting…

The Sogo Shosha Playbook: Lessons from Buffett’s $30 Billion Bet on Japan’s Trading Houses

In 2020, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway disclosed stakes in Japan's five great trading houses — Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo. The market treated it as a curiosity. Half a decade later, it looks like one of Berkshire's…

The New Resource Geopolitics: Critical Minerals, Chips, and the Scramble for Supply-Chain Resilience

The materials that make modern technology possible — gallium for chips, rare earths for magnets, cobalt and lithium for batteries — have become some of the most contested assets in geopolitics. What was once a quiet corner of industrial…

Geothermal’s Quiet Advantage: Indonesia’s Underused Answer to the Baseload Problem

Most energy-transition coverage gravitates to solar panels and wind turbines. They are cheap, fast to build, and increasingly cheaper than new fossil generation. But they share a weakness that matters enormously for a coal-dependent grid: they…

The Data-Center Land Rush: How AI Demand Is Reshaping Southeast Asia’s Digital Backbone

Behind every AI model and every cloud application sits a physical reality: racks of servers in vast, power-hungry buildings. As Southeast Asia's digital economy crossed $300 billion in 2025 and entered its self-described "AI reality," the constraint…

Beyond the Balance Sheet: Why Strategic Alliances Are Becoming the Default Growth Engine

The dominant headlines of 2025 and 2026 belong to the megadeal — multibillion-dollar acquisitions reshaping entire sectors. But beneath the blockbuster transactions, a quieter shift is reshaping how companies grow. Increasingly, the smartest…