By Dr. Jianli Yang
Artificial intelligence is rarely treated as part of the South China Sea contest. Most analysis separates the region into two strategic maps. One concerns reefs, coast-guard vessels, military bases, fisheries, and freedom of navigation. The other concerns data centers, cloud computing, large language models, digital trade, and technological standards. Beijing does not observe this distinction.
China’s emerging AI strategy toward Southeast Asia should be understood as part of its larger effort to shape the political and economic environment surrounding the South China Sea. The objective is not necessarily to persuade Southeast Asian countries to endorse China’s maritime claims, but to make confrontation with China progressively more economically, technologically, and institutionally costly.
China’s earlier Digital Silk Road focused on telecommunications networks, fiber-optic cables, surveillance systems, e-commerce, payment platforms, and smart-city infrastructure. Its AI strategy adds models, computing services, training programs, industry applications, data- processing tools, and governance institutions. The China-ASEAN Artificial Intelligence Application Cooperation Center in Nanning serves as an institutional centerpiece, while the China-ASEAN ministerial-level AI dialogue launched in 2025 provides a governmental mechanism for cooperation. In May 2026, an ASEAN-China Artificial Intelligence Industry Innovation Centre was inaugurated in Beijing.
Chinese firms provide the commercial layer. Huawei promotes cloud and AI ecosystems in Indonesia, while Alibaba Cloud works with Malaysian institutions, universities, small businesses, and local partners through training, hackathons, cloud adoption, and digitalization programs. Chinese firms are similarly active in Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and other ASEAN markets.
Vietnam illustrates the complexity of this strategy. Hanoi regards Beijing as both its most consequential economic partner and its principal maritime rival, yet the two governments continue discussing cooperation in AI, semiconductors, 5G, infrastructure, and industrial supply chains. The Philippines, despite its sharper maritime confrontation with China and closer defense relationship with Washington, remains part of ASEAN-wide mechanisms through which Beijing can maintain technological engagement. This is one of China’s advantages: regional institutions allow it to sustain technological ties even when bilateral political relations deteriorate.
Governments deliberately hedge, purchasing Chinese telecommunications equipment, American cloud services, Japanese maritime systems, South Korean electronics, and European cybersecurity products simultaneously. Beijing’s strategy is therefore less about technological exclusivity than strategic indispensability. Open-source models are particularly useful because they are cheaper to adapt and deploy locally than expensive proprietary systems. China can therefore compete not only through frontier-model performance but through accessibility, deployment, and integration.
The distinction between civilian and security applications is unusually porous. Systems monitoring illegal fishing can track vessels; port software generates logistics data; disaster- response satellite analytics can support maritime surveillance. The aggregation of cloud infrastructure, data access, software dependencies, technical training, and government relationships can generate strategic influence even when individual projects are entirely commercial.
This produces what might be called “political ballast.” China’s maritime activities generate persistent friction with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. AI cooperation cannot eliminate these disputes, but it can prevent them from defining China’s overall relationships. Every laboratory, cloud contract, training center, ministerial dialogue, university partnership, and business ecosystem creates constituencies benefiting from stable relations with Beijing. During maritime crises, these networks act as ballast against complete strategic alignment with Washington.
While the United States retains advantages, leading AI laboratories, advanced semiconductors, cloud providers, universities, venture capital, allied technology networks, and strong demand for trusted digital systems, it has lacked a coherent Southeast Asian strategy connecting these assets to South China Sea geopolitics.
There are signs of change. The first U.S.-ASEAN AI Ministerial in May 2026 addressed AI development, chips, computing capacity, cybersecurity, data centers, and trusted digital systems, and Washington subsequently announced plans to make Southeast Asia a focus of American AI exports. But meetings and export promotion do not yet constitute a regional strategy.
The United States should not try to force Southeast Asia into an anti-China technology bloc, but instead make technological diversification affordable and strategically meaningful. Washington and its allies should establish a South China Sea digital resilience initiative supporting trusted maritime-domain awareness, fisheries protection, environmental monitoring, disaster response, search and rescue, and protection of undersea infrastructure. Shared AI tools could combine satellite imagery, vessel-tracking information, weather data, and coast guard reporting while preserving national control over sensitive information.
America should also create an ASEAN AI compute partnership with Japan, Australia, and South Korea. It should compete seriously in open-source AI by supporting adaptable models in Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, Filipino, Khmer, and other regional languages.
Equally important is preserving “algorithmic sovereignty”: governments should know where their data are stored, how models are updated, whether systems can be independently audited, and whether critical services can continue if a foreign provider withdraws access.
China is building influence layer by layer, through infrastructure, applications, standards, training, institutions, and dependency. Its strategy recognizes that geopolitical power increasingly resides not only in who controls territory, but in who designs the systems through which governments see, calculate, communicate, and decide.
The South China Sea is therefore becoming more than a contest over rocks, reefs, and shipping lanes. It is becoming an algorithmic sea. The United States will remain a Pacific military power. The unanswered question is whether it will also become a durable partner in the technological systems through which the region’s future will be governed.
Dr. Jianli Yang is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a columnist for National Review.
