Nearly six in ten Asia Pacific respondents expect their organizations to increase artificial intelligence investment by more than 25 percent in 2026 compared with 2025, according to the regional findings of Digital Realty’s 2026 Global Data Insights Survey.

The survey found 59 percent of APAC respondents expect AI investment growth above that threshold, compared with 55 percent globally. TNGlobal has previously reported on Digital Realty’s AI infrastructure expansion in Singapore, where the company has positioned infrastructure readiness as a growing requirement for production AI workloads.

The APAC results are based on 707 IT decision-makers across Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. They form part of a wider survey of 2,131 respondents across 19 countries.

Different markets, different AI priorities

Digital Realty said the regional results show enterprises moving at different speeds and prioritizing different constraints as AI deployment expands.

In Australia, 33 percent of respondents said their organizations are currently realizing returns on AI investment, more than double the APAC average of 16 percent. The survey also found 47 percent of Australian respondents had real-time AI in deployment, compared with 36 percent across the region.

In Japan, 30 percent of respondents ranked compliance with AI and data privacy regulations as the top requirement for a successful AI strategy, compared with 18 percent across APAC. When choosing where to host AI workloads, 22 percent of Japanese respondents placed regulatory compliance first, compared with 12 percent regionally.

Singapore respondents placed greater emphasis on infrastructure readiness. Half cited a lack of specialized AI infrastructure as a challenge, compared with 40 percent across APAC, while 39 percent reported measurable business outcomes from AI.

In South Korea, 24 percent ranked reliable interconnection as their top requirement for AI strategy success, compared with 14 percent across APAC. The survey also found 46 percent of South Korean respondents reported integrated interconnection across key cloud and infrastructure platforms or an architecture centered on dynamic, on-demand interconnection.

Data location becomes part of AI architecture

Across APAC, 92 percent of respondents said their data-location strategy is tied to AI plans, while 88 percent said their organizations already follow a distributed data approach.

Despite that distribution, only 22 percent described their hybrid infrastructure as fully integrated. Digital Realty said that gap matters as enterprises need to connect data, compute, cloud platforms and partners across multiple markets while accounting for local performance, availability and regulatory requirements.

Serene Nah, Digital Realty’s Managing Director and Head of APAC, said enterprises are balancing returns, infrastructure readiness, compliance and interconnection as AI moves into broader deployment.

Survey context

The findings should be read as a survey of enterprise IT decision-makers rather than a measure of all companies across Asia Pacific. Respondents represented organizations with between 500 and more than 10,000 employees across eleven industries.

Even with that limitation, the results point to a regional infrastructure challenge: AI spending is rising faster than the ability of many enterprises to fully integrate distributed environments. The next phase of AI adoption is therefore likely to depend as much on workload placement, connectivity and governance as on model capability itself.

Featured image: Ron Lach on Pexels

Digital Realty targets nearly $5.5B investment to strengthen Singapore as Asia Pacific AI hub