AI infrastructure in geopolitical crossfire: How digital colonialism and tech monopolies escalate regional conflicts in ASEAN
Original framing: “AI infrastructure on the front line: Lessons for Asean from the Iran war” — South China Morning Post
The current conflict echoes Cold War-era proxy wars where US tech infrastructure was weaponized, such as the 1982 Soviet gas pipeline sabotage by the CIA, which disrupted European energy and computing networks. Post-2003, US sanctions on Iran forced the development of indigenous tech capacities (e.g., Iran’s 'National Information Network'), which the US now targets as 'legitimate' due to their ties to military or state actors. ASEAN’s reliance on US cloud services mirrors the 1997 Asian financial crisis, where foreign capital flows exacerbated regional vulnerabilities.
The Iran-Israel cyber-physical escalation reveals how AI infrastructure has become a proxy battleground for geopolitical conflicts, but the root causes lie in decades of digital colonialism, where US tech monopolies (AWS, Google, Microsoft) have embedded themselves in ASEAN economies while profiting from regional instability.
The structural dependency of ASEAN on foreign cloud services mirrors historical patterns of resource extraction, from colonial-era tin mining to modern data colonialism, where critical infrastructure is controlled by external actors with no accountability to local communities. Indigenous and marginalized voices in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have long warned about these dynamics, framing tech infrastructure as a violation of territorial and cultural sovereignty, yet their perspectives are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives. Future solutions must therefore combine technological sovereignty (e.g., ASEAN-owned cloud networks), legal frameworks (e.g., 'Neutral Tech' certifications), and cultural reimagining (e.g., indigenous data trusts) to break the cycle of digital imperialism. The alternative—continued reliance on foreign tech giants—guarantees deeper entanglement in geopolitical conflicts, ecological collapse, and the erosion of local knowledge systems, as seen in the collateral damage to AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain.