3 Before 9: March 29, 2026

1. OpenAI Taps JioStar CEO Kiran Mani to Lead Asia-Pacific Push

OpenAI has appointed Kiran Mani, the outgoing chief executive of Indian streaming platform JioStar, as its first managing director for Asia-Pacific. Mani will relocate to OpenAI's Singapore office in June and report to chief strategy officer Jason Kwon. Before running JioStar, he spent more than 13 years at Google leading Android and Google Play operations across Asia-Pacific and Japan, with earlier stints at Microsoft and IBM. The newly created role puts OpenAI in direct competition with Anthropic and Google for market share across the region's most populous and fastest-growing economies.

Why it matters: India alone has 1.4 billion potential users, and Southeast Asia's enterprise AI adoption is accelerating rapidly. By planting a senior operator in Singapore - the region's de facto AI hub - OpenAI is signalling that Asia-Pacific is no longer a secondary market but a front line in the race for global AI dominance. Enterprise buyers across ASEAN and India should expect more aggressive local pricing, partnerships, and go-to-market plays from OpenAI in the months ahead.

2. FPT AI Factory Deploys NVIDIA Blackwell Chips Across Southeast Asia and Japan

Vietnam's FPT Corporation announced on Wednesday that its AI Factory division will deploy NVIDIA's latest HGX B300 systems - the Blackwell architecture designed for advanced reasoning and agentic AI workloads - across its data centres in Vietnam and Japan. FPT AI Factory currently runs 43 cloud services on older NVIDIA H100 and H200 platforms, serving more than 18,000 users in sectors including finance, healthcare, and technology. The company reported 2025 revenue of US$2.66 billion and is positioning the upgrade as a production-grade developer cloud rather than a research testbed. Early access registrations are now open, with general availability expected later this year.

Why it matters: Most enterprises in Southeast Asia still rely on hyperscaler regions in Singapore or Tokyo for heavy AI compute, and local alternatives have been thin on the ground. FPT's Blackwell deployment gives developers and corporate buyers across ASEAN and Japan a closer, potentially cheaper option for training and running reasoning-intensive AI models without shipping data halfway around the world. It also cements Vietnam's growing ambitions as a regional AI infrastructure player, not just a software outsourcing hub.

3. Forrester Forecasts 9.3% Asia-Pacific Tech Spending Growth but Warns AI Costs Will Bite

Forrester's latest forecast projects Asia-Pacific technology spending will grow 9.3 per cent in 2026, with the region set to spend more than US$437 billion on new technology between 2025 and 2030. Computer equipment leads at 13.7 per cent growth, driven by hyperscaler investment in AI-optimised data centres, while software spending climbs 10.7 per cent as vendors embed AI capabilities into renewal pricing. China's AI infrastructure outlay alone will exceed US$70 billion this year, fuelled by Alibaba, ByteDance, and government digitisation mandates. However, Forrester warns that hardware cost inflation, tariff pass-through on China-origin supply chains, regulatory fragmentation, and talent shortages will erode the real purchasing power behind those headline numbers.

Why it matters: The 9.3 per cent topline looks healthy, but enterprise buyers across the region face a squeeze - AI-linked hardware and software prices are rising faster than budgets, and regulatory complexity from Vietnam's new AI law to Australia's tightening data rules adds compliance cost on top. For technology leaders planning 2026 procurement in ASEAN, India, or Greater China, the message is clear: spending more does not automatically mean getting more, and vendor negotiations on AI-embedded pricing will be critical.