4 Digital Infrastructure Trends in Asia-Pacific for 2025

As we wrap up 2024, technological change continues to accelerate. Business leaders know that staying ahead means quickly adapting to these changes and harnessing them to drive growth.

At Equinix, we're committed to helping you navigate this evolution with resilient digital infrastructure and essential data center services. Let's explore four key trends that can transform how you do business in the Asia-Pacific region in 2025 and beyond.

Trend 1: Enterprises are adopting hybrid AI infrastructure

While the initial AI boom rode the wave of public cloud-based large language models (LLMs), we're seeing a significant shift in how businesses approach AI deployment. Many organizations are discovering a better way to handle private data.

Instead of sending your sensitive data to public cloud models (the data-to-the-model approach), consider bringing the model to your data. This model-to-the-data strategy involves deploying AI models on your private compute infrastructure, right next to your data storage and close to your users.

Why are businesses making this shift? It comes down to three key factors: privacy, speed, and cost.

Privacy: Many of the most promising AI use cases involve working with datasets that contain sensitive, private and regulated information like financial records for fraud protection or medical images for healthcare services. Enterprises are choosing to deploy AI infrastructure privately to ensure complete control of their data, compliance with data sovereignty requirements and the ability to train customized models with their own proprietary data.

Speed: The seamless use of AI services depends on low-latency connections between users and the compute infrastructure that hosts the service. Speed is even more critical when advancing beyond text-based queries to audio, images and video. By placing your AI infrastructure in distributed colocation data centers located close to your users, you can achieve the low latency your services require.

Cost: While early-stage AI services that only require limited data transfer may be better served by a model hosted in a public cloud, private AI infrastructure may be more cost-effective for mature services that require the transfer of large volumes of data between users and models.

In 2025, we expect to see an increase in enterprises deploying hybrid AI infrastructure for the flexibility of leveraging private and public infrastructure, depending on which of these three factors is most important.

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Trend 2: Businesses are protecting themselves from threats driven by AI and quantum computing

Risk in Asia-Pacific is intensifying due to the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks that leverage AI and IoT technologies. Similarly, the proliferation of IoT devices expands the attack surface, making robust security measures more critical than ever. IDC predicts that "in 2026, 55% of CIOs will diversify and broaden security strategies across their organization's IT and security teams to address new/fast-evolving threats to their technology and supply chain ecosystem."[1]

Quantum computing presents serious risks to critical elements of the current public key infrastructure, as it will soon have the ability to break the encryption in minutes. Nation-state actors are already collecting encrypted sensitive data and planning to decrypt it once quantum technology catches up. These harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks make quantum-ready security essential for your business.

That's why generative AI tools and quantum cryptography are becoming crucial components of modern security strategies. Services like Quantum Key Distribution as a Service (QaaS) can protect your enterprise networks with unprecedented levels of security, helping you stay ahead of sophisticated cyber threats.

QaaS companies provide access to quantum-enhanced cybersecurity solutions for organizations to address harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks, ensuring data remains secure now and in the future. Enterprises can protect against evolving cyber threats by accessing quantum-enhanced cybersecurity solutions that protect critical data assets without large upfront investments.

Trend 3: Edge computing helps ensure data sovereignty

Due to the increased focus of governments on data sovereignty, coupled with the rise of the IoT, generative AI, and real-time applications, enterprises require robust IT infrastructure at the edge. According to the latest IDC Worldwide Edge Spending Guide, Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) spending on edge computing is forecasted to reach $48.9 billion in 2024, an increase of 16.2% over 2023.[2] Edge computing enables localized data processing, which helps businesses lower data transfer risks and comply with data sovereignty laws, which vary widely across Asia-Pacific.

In the Asia-Pacific region, several countries have begun implementing stringent data sovereignty policies to protect citizen data. For instance, China's Cybersecurity Law mandates that data collected within the country must be stored domestically.[3] Similarly, Indonesia's Government Regulation No. 71 requires electronic system operators to store data locally. These regulations highlight the need for localized data processing solutions like edge computing to facilitate compliance and secure data handling.[4]

Edge data centers will be essential for complying with evolving data sovereignty regulations, while also enabling real-time data processing.

Trend 4: Hybrid multicloud continues to enable maximum flexibility

An increasing percentage of businesses in Asia-Pacific recognize that cloud adoption is how they can advance their digital transformation initiatives and accelerate innovation, demonstrated by the significant volume of investments they're making in public cloud services. According to the latest IDC Worldwide Software and Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) spending on Software and Public Cloud Services is forecasted to reach $214 billion in 2024, with a compounded annual growth (CAGR) of 13.8% by 2028 for the next 5 years.[5]

While there are more options for cloud providers than ever, many businesses find that a hybrid approach works best. Why choose hybrid multicloud? It gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together the agility of multiple public cloud services and the benefits of private infrastructure. Whether you're dealing with GPU scarcity, unpredictable cloud costs or specific data control requirements, a hybrid approach lets you optimize your infrastructure for your needs.

Adopting a hybrid multicloud approach allows businesses to become more agile, adapting to the ever-evolving business environment while maintaining control over their critical workloads.

Your path forward: sustainable digital infrastructure

As you prepare for 2025, these technological advances offer exciting opportunities for your business in the Asia-Pacific region. From the development of private AI environments and quantum-enhanced cybersecurity to the accelerated adoption of edge computing and hybrid multicloud solutions, these trends will shape the future of the digital landscape.

At Equinix, our global digital infrastructure platform offers high-speed connectivity to an extensive ecosystem of cloud and network providers, enabling seamless integration and efficient data movement. But success isn't just about adopting new technologies-it's about doing so sustainably. Through our worldwide network of sustainably powered data centers, Equinix can help you reduce your carbon footprint while staying at the cutting edge of innovation. You can drive your business forward while contributing to a more sustainable future.

To learn more about how deploying the right digital infrastructure can help fast-track your business in 2025, read the Leaders Guide to Digital Infrastructure.

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[1] IDC, "IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2025 Predictions," Doc # US52641324, October 2024.

[2] IDC, "IDC Worldwide Edge Spending Guide," Doc # IDC_P39947_0724, October 2024.

[3] Overview of data sovereignty laws by country, InCountry, April 9, 2024.

[4] Matthew P. Goodman, Governing Data in the Asia-Pacific, April 21, 2021.

[5] IDC, "IDC Worldwide Software and Public Cloud Services Spending Guide," Doc #P33214_0724, July 2024.