Ten years ago, Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company projected that Southeast Asia’s digital economy would reach US$200 billion by 2025. The region not only met that target, but exceeded it by a wide margin.
The 2025 e-Conomy SEA report shows that the region’s gross merchandise value (GMV) is now on track to surpass US$300 billion this year, 1.5 times higher than the original projection made a decade ago. Over the past ten years, regional GMV has grown 7.4 times, while revenue has increased 11.2 times.
Regional GMV reached US$263 billion in 2024, up 15% from the previous year, while profitability surged to US$11 billion, growing 2.5 times since 2022. Beneath this seemingly stable growth, however, lies a far more uneven story once the data is broken down country by country.
Who Leads: It’s Not Just About Scale
Indonesia continues to dominate in terms of volume. The country’s digital economy is approaching US$100 billion in 2025, with 14% growth from the previous year and double-digit increases across all sectors: e-commerce, online travel, media, transportation, and food services. But leadership in scale does not always translate into leadership in the quality of growth.
Singapore, despite its much smaller scale, leads in a different dimension. The country secured US$1.31 billion in private AI funding, the highest among Southeast Asia’s six major economies, with AI investment growing 55% within a single semester.
More than US$2.3 billion has been invested in over 680 AI startups across the region over the past year, accounting for more than 30% of total private funding value in the first half of 2025. Most of these AI startups are based in Singapore.
The Engines of Growth: E-Commerce and AI as the Backbone
E-commerce has become the main engine of growth, with transaction value projected to reach US$185 billion throughout 2025. One of the key drivers is video commerce — shopping through livestreams and video content — which now accounts for 25% of all e-commerce transactions after growing fivefold in just three years.
In digital payments, eight ASEAN countries can now conduct cross-border QR code payments, signaling that digital financial services are no longer confined by national borders.
AI adoption across the region is also far ahead of global trends. Consumer interest in AI in Southeast Asia is recorded at three times the global average, with five countries — Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia — ranking among the world’s top 20 for multimodal AI usage.
To support this surge, the region’s data center capacity is projected to grow by 180% over the next few years, significantly faster than the Asia-Pacific average of 120%.
Who Is Falling Behind: A Gap Yet to Be Closed
Behind the region’s aggregate figures, four countries — Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar — were included in the e-Conomy SEA report for the first time this year.
Together, these four countries contribute only around 2% of the region’s total GMV. Their combined digital economy is expected to reach just US$6 billion in 2025, with projections ranging between US$10 billion and US$25 billion by 2030, driven mainly by e-commerce as well as transportation and food delivery services.
Myanmar presents perhaps the most complex case. Ongoing challenges have left its travel sector heavily dependent on domestic routes. Yet at the same time, AI-based applications are growing rapidly there and in Cambodia, with revenues increasing by 86% and 116% respectively.
Southeast Asia’s digital economy as a whole is projected to grow toward US$1 trillion by 2030. With the full implementation of the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), that figure could potentially double to US$2 trillion. How much of that growth will actually be shared by the countries currently lagging behind, however, remains an open question.
