The AI Race Is Also Won in Emerging Markets
Many investors dismiss emerging market tech as "more of the same" in the AI chapter. That is an expensive misconception – here is why Asia is leading the battle for AI infrastructure.
When we talk about the global AI race, our gaze instinctively shifts to San Francisco, Seattle, and London. But some of the most decisive battles in this race are being fought in Seoul, Taipei, Bangalore, and Jakarta – and many investors are about to miss it entirely.
DNB investment economist Camilla Vik raises this challenge in an E24 op-ed, questioning the myth that emerging market (EM) technology investments represent merely "more of the same." BrainTrust's analysis confirms and extends her argument: emerging markets are not playing a supporting role in the AI revolution – they are the very foundation upon which it rests.
Semiconductors decide – and they are made in Asia
Artificial intelligence is, at its core, a hardware story. Without advanced semiconductors – specifically graphics processing units (GPUs) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) – there is no AI training, no large language models, no autonomous agents. And these components are produced overwhelmingly in emerging markets across Asia.
South Korea's SK Hynix is today the dominant supplier of HBM chips that power NVIDIA's H100 and H200 GPUs – the engine behind NVIDIA's growth story. Samsung, another South Korean company, competes fiercely for the same market position, investing hundreds of billions of won into next-generation memory technology. TSMC in Taiwan manufactures almost all of the world's advanced chips below 5 nanometers – including Apple's own silicon and NVIDIA's upcoming Blackwell architecture. Without these three companies, global AI development stops.
India and Southeast Asia: the next wave
Beyond semiconductors, we are witnessing a rapid build-out of AI infrastructure across India and Southeast Asia. India holds one of the world's largest reservoirs of engineering talent, and the Indian government has launched ambitious programs to develop national AI data centers and stimulate domestic chip design. Companies like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services are already deeply embedded in the global AI services market.
In Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia, the data center industry is growing at double-digit rates, driven by regional demand for cloud services and AI capacity. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all announced major investments in the region over the past twelve months. This is not marginal growth – it is structural rewiring of the global digital map.
The investment implication: EM tech is not "more of the same"
The classic criticism of EM tech exposure is that it simply replicates the exposure already captured through S&P 500 and Nasdaq, only cheaper. This analysis is too simplistic for 2026. Asian EM tech is not primarily about consumer apps or advertising platforms – it is about the physical infrastructure that AI depends upon. That infrastructure is not replicated in Western indices.
Samsung's and SK Hynix's HBM chips, TSMC's advanced fabrication processes, and India's growing AI services market represent distinct, low-correlation exposures compared to the Magnificent Seven in the US. For an investor already heavily concentrated in American tech giants, EM tech can actually reduce concentration risk – while simultaneously providing participation in the core infrastructure of the 21st century's technology economy.
BrainTrust's conclusion: emerging markets are not a secondary actor in the AI race. They are the primary supplier of the prerequisites that allow the race to happen at all. The best-informed institutional investors have known this for some time – and the rest of the market is beginning to understand it now.