e-Conomy SEA report: Southeast Asia's digital economy to reach $368 billion in 2026, $1 trillion by 2035

Google, Temasek and Bain & Company published the 11th edition of the annual e-Conomy SEA report on October 21, projecting that Southeast Asia's digital economy will grow 17% year on year to $368 billion in gross merchandise value in 2026 and pass $1 trillion by 2035.

The report, titled Building the Intelligent Economy, uses tokens as a new yardstick for the AI economy and projects that growing confidence in agentic commerce will drive a 60-fold surge in regional AI usage over the next five years.

The scale behind that forecast is already visible. Generative AI is part of daily life for 243 million people in the region, or 58% of the working population, and is scaling four times faster than mobile internet did.

By sector, e-commerce anchors the shift at $226 billion in GMV, up 18%, with multimodal discovery and in-app assistants credited with 10% higher conversion and order volume uplifts of up to 75%. Online travel reaches $59 billion, up 10%, where generative AI has overtaken social media as the second most-used tool for planning complex itineraries. Online media revenue is $44 billion, up 22%; mobility and food delivery $40 billion, up 15%; digital financial services $1,650 billion in GTV, up 16%.

The headline behavioral finding is trust. 72% of users already rely on everyday automation such as price tracking, and 75% say they would let an AI agent compare prices and complete transactions on their behalf. 62% report more trust in AI tools than a year ago, citing proven track records, familiarity and output accuracy.

That willingness comes with conditions: 44% want robust privacy safeguards, 36% want clear information about what AI can and cannot do, and 30% want the ability to reverse agent-initiated transactions.

On infrastructure, the report says supporting a projected 60-fold increase in regional AI usage by 2030 requires roughly a threefold expansion of data center capacity within five years, with AI workloads taking a dominant share. It points to Singapore's binding power usage effectiveness rules and Malaysia's corporate renewable energy scheme as models for efficiency and power supply.

Policy is the fourth pillar. The ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, slated for November 2026, is described as the world's first region-wide digital trade pact and a framework for unlocking further growth. For investors and companies expanding into the region, the report's value is that it moves the story from app penetration to AI infrastructure and agentic commerce; the near-term tests are whether the DEFA text lands on schedule and whether data center and power buildout can keep pace with the usage curve it projects.