Artificial intelligence (AI) spending across Asia-Pacific is projected to more than quadruple to $555.2 billion by 2030, increasing pressure on the data centers and computing resources needed to support growing AI use.
Market intelligence firm International Data Corp. (IDC) expects regional spending on AI and generative AI (GenAI), including China and Japan, to increase from $121.5 billion in 2025. This represents an annual growth rate of 35.5%, according to the IDC Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide.
Companies are putting AI into more customer-facing and daily business activities, including customer service, guided selling, fraud detection, logistics, planning, and IT management. However, the rapid increase in demand could test whether the region has enough computing power and reliable data center capacity.
“The next phase of AI adoption in Asia Pacific will be defined by how effectively organizations can move from experimentation to scaled, operational deployments,” said Vinayaka Venkatesh, senior market analyst, Data and Analytics, IDC Asia/Pacific. “Agentic AI is moving from pilot to production faster than most organizations anticipated, while governments are taking a more proactive approach to establishing AI governance frameworks.”
IDC said companies and hyperscalers, which operate large cloud and data center networks, are increasing investments in infrastructure to handle more demanding AI workloads. As usage grows, the availability of infrastructure is becoming a major constraint, making capacity, reliability, and operational readiness more important.
AI infrastructure provisioning is already the largest use case, accounting for about 32% of total AI spending in Asia-Pacific. This includes the computers, cloud services, and data center systems required to build and run AI applications.
China will remain the region’s largest AI market by a wide margin. Spending is expected to grow from $63.7 billion in 2025 to $303.4 billion in 2030, an annual growth rate of 36.6%.
Japan is projected to record the fastest growth, with spending climbing from $16.7 billion to $88.9 billion at an annual rate of 39.8%. Spending in APAC excluding China and Japan is forecast to increase from $41 billion to $162 billion.
Software and Information Services will account for 42.7% of regional AI spending in 2026. Financial Services will follow with 9.8%, while Government and Telecommunications will account for 7.7% and 6.2%, respectively.
Together, the four industries are expected to generate about two-thirds of APAC AI and generative AI spending during the forecast period.