(Oct 9): Asia’s booming data-centre industry faces growing political risks as billions of dollars in investment hinge on a handful of US technology giants whose ability to operate globally could be upended by Washington’s increasingly unpredictable stance toward China, according to the chief of one of Hong Kong’s biggest conglomerates.

“The risk we think the most about at this point is actually political risk,” Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd chief executive officer Lincoln Pan told the Milken Asia Summit in Singapore on Friday. “If you look at this debate about the US and China and the significant bets many people are making around this sector, particularly around data centres and AI large language models coming out of the US, it’s a highly concentrated bet on the stability of US data policy.”

Private equity giants including Blackstone Inc and KKR & Co have poured billions of dollars into Asian data centres, betting that the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing will fuel demand for computing capacity for years to come.

While Asia’s digital infrastructure will struggle to keep pace with that demand, those facilities depend heavily on US hyperscalers that operate and are influenced significantly by US government policy, said Pan, whose company has real estate investments across Asia through its Hongkong Land unit.

Whether US-domiciled companies will be allowed to operate globally with the same degree of stability and certainty over the next decade is “a highly, highly uncertain risk that no one can underwrite,” he said.

President Donald Trump has been pushing AI investment in a race with China, even as some AI companies call for slower development and a public backlash over data centres emerges. China remains Asia’s biggest market for data centres, while outside the mainland, Western cloud providers account for about 70% of hyperscaler demand and Chinese players about 30%, according to a McKinsey report in June.

Pan’s remarks come as Firmus Grid Ltd abandoned its attempt at one of Australia’s biggest-ever initial public offerings, after the Nvidia Corp-backed data centre company failed to lure global investors who have grown increasingly skittish over frothy AI valuations. Much of Firmus’ valuation was based on the company successfully building a pipeline of data centres across Asia serving customers such as Meta Platforms Inc and OpenAI.

The uncertainty extends beyond data centres to the broader AI investment boom. Despite the flood of capital into the sector, Jim Coulter, executive chairman of TPG Inc, cautioned that investors should resist assuming today’s winners and business models are already clear, saying the three most important words in AI are “I don’t know.”

Speaking on the same panel, Coulter likened investing in AI to the chaos of playing pinball, with more traditional investment akin to the repetition of 10-pin bowling.

“We have a number of themes that are very long-term themes that we’re still bowling,” he said. “But over the other side of the bowling alley, we’re playing pinball in AI because you have to shorten your cycle.”

Uploaded by Magessan Varatharaja