Subsea supply looked scarce; a record wave of cable construction has changed the calculus. Power was a footnote; it is now the first filter every AI infrastructure decision runs through. NaaS was promising; it is now shipping. As ITW Asia returns to the Shangri-La, Singapore on 1-3 December 2026, alongside Datacloud Asia, this piece revisits last year’s ten takeaways, updates them against what has actually happened in 2026, and maps them onto this year’s agenda.

• Asia’s subsea race is now about capacity, resilience and route diversity

A year ago, the story was undersupply, but that framing has not aged well: TeleGeography now expects roughly 40 new cables to enter commercial service in 2026, against around $6 billion of new investment, up from roughly $3.2 billion in 2025 – the biggest annual jump in more than a decade. Google alone is deploying eight new Pacific systems this year.

The Microsoft- and Lightstorm-backed cable linking India, Malaysia and Singapore is one of several projects reflecting a shift from carrier-owned consortia toward hyperscaler-led private systems. The sharper 2026 question is not whether there is enough capacity, but whether it is resilient and diverse enough to withstand the Red Sea disruption and the concentration risk of a handful of critical routes and hubs. That is precisely the territory ITW Asia’s opening-day panel on building Asia’s next-gen connectivity: resilience, risk and reality will cover, followed by a dedicated meetup on resilience, redundancy and route diversity.

• Power availability is determining where digital infrastructure can grow

This is the theme that has grown the most since last year, to the point that it now deserves to absorb what were previously two separate points about green energy and Asian power constraints. Grid access, not land or fibre, is now the binding constraint on APAC data centre growth. Moody’s expects the region to draw around $800 billion of data centre investment by 2030, more than doubling installed capacity, while Deloitte projects regional electricity demand from data centres could expand up to five times by the mid-2030s.

Operators are responding by treating power procurement as core infrastructure strategy rather than a downstream line item, from behind-the-meter generation to renewable PPAs. ITW Asia has built an entire day-two track around this: back-to-back panels on whether Asia can power its AI ambitions, whether the AI race is becoming a power race, how operators can secure power beyond the grid, and whether growth and decarbonisation can co-exist, alongside a standalone Digital Infrastructure Energy Summit.

• AI is changing the geography and architecture of connectivity

The biggest gap in last year’s list. As AI training, inference and sovereign compute spread across the region, networks have to connect larger data centre clusters, move heavier workloads and deliver more capacity, resilience and programmability than they were built for. This is now explicit in the ITW Asia 2026 agenda, from the opening keynote on developing Singapore’s AI ecosystem and the infrastructure to support it through to a dedicated panel asking where AI is “rewiring Asia’s networks” and where capacity is needed next.

• NaaS is moving connectivity toward a cloud-like consumption model

Progress here is real but uneven. BT’s Global Fabric NaaS platform is now live with customer traffic, and Ciena and Nokia executives have been positioning NaaS as a reinvention of what operators sell, not just a cost play. Enterprises want cloud-like control of connectivity, but interoperability and standardised APIs remain unresolved industry-wide, which is why “the next growth engine” for telco revenue is on the agenda as its own keynote panel this year.

• AI is becoming operational inside live telecom networks

Energy optimisation and network automation are moving from pilot to production. Vendor efficiency claims vary, so the credible framing is trend rather than headline figure: AI is now doing real work inside live networks rather than being tested in isolation. It threads through several ITW Asia sessions rather than sitting in one, including the interconnection economy keynote on partnerships, peering and power dynamics.

• Data sovereignty is shaping architecture as well as compliance

If anything, this has intensified. Regulation across the region remains fragmented, from Vietnam’s draft personal data protection law to amendments to Singapore’s PDPA, while nearly 90% of APAC enterprises now run multi-cloud workloads that have to be mapped against those rules. The framing that stuck is that sovereignty is accelerating, not stalling, the evolution of cloud, turning it from a utility into part of each nation’s critical infrastructure. Telcos are increasingly positioned as the natural anchors for sovereign AI buildout in markets hyperscalers have not yet reached.

• Satellite is becoming an integrated layer of the mobile network

The “complementary or competitive” question is resolving in real time. SES has just deepened its stake in Elveo Mobile, the direct-to-device operator formed from the Lynk Global-Omnispace merger, narrowing the D2D race to three serious players, while Amazon has filed to launch over 5,000 LEO satellites for its own D2D network to compete with Starlink. Closer to the region, Astrum Mobile is building out satellite-to-device NTN service specifically for Asia Pacific.

Given Southeast Asia’s archipelagic geography, satellite’s move from backup to primary path is a regional as much as a global story – and the kind of question this year’s expanded ITW Asia agenda, with its dedicated AI and connectivity tracks, is built to test.

• Capital is accelerating into Southeast Asia, but becoming more selective

DayOne raised more than $2 billion in equity in January 2026 to back the SIJORI corridor spanning Singapore, Johor and Batam, plus expansion into Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong; Vantage Data Centers has closed a $1.6 billion APAC investment including a 300MW Johor campus.

There’s a bigger story here, broadening beyond Singapore into Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, paired with growing investor selectivity around power availability and execution risk. TM Global’s positioning of Malaysia as a digital infrastructure gateway to ASEAN is one expression of that shift, and ITW Asia’s fireside chat on where capital is flowing next in Asia’s AI connectivity backbone is a direct read on it.

Secure your pass for ITW Asia 2026 to be part of the conversation in Singapore this December.

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