Asia's AI export boom is huge, and it is barely making jobs

The numbers behind Asia's AI trade are enormous. Six economies, Indonesia among them with China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, shipped 1.4 trillion dollars of AI-related goods in the twelve months to April, on World Bank figures. American imports of AI-enabling goods rose almost 60 per cent in early 2026 while the rest of what the United States bought from abroad fell by nearly a quarter. Mia Mikic, a trade economist writing for the Lowy Institute, argues that the shape of this trade matters more than its size.

Most of it is assembly. Computers, servers and routers put together from parts made elsewhere make up 69 per cent of Thailand's AI-related exports and 60 per cent of Vietnam's. China ships 785 billion dollars of mostly half-finished goods into Southeast Asia to be assembled, while the design, the software and the patents stay abroad and collect most of the money. Assembly is the thinnest slice of the value, and it is the slice the region has.

Mikic's harder point is about work. Manufacturing used to be an escalator: factory jobs lifted poor countries into middle-income ones. Countries whose industrial employment share peaked in 2015 and 2019 did so at incomes of roughly 900 to 5,900 dollars a head, well short of rich. The AI version is worse on jobs than the old one. A data centre in Malaysia needs about 4.6 million ringgit of investment for every job it creates, against under 1 million ringgit in electronics and carmaking. Her answer is services, which already account for 26 to 33 per cent of the value of the world's manufactured exports, plus skills and better connections. She also warns the boom is not promised: American tech giants are spending more than a trillion dollars across 2025 and 2026, and that cycle can turn.

Why it matters

For a country that has just counted about a million jobless graduates, this is the uncomfortable part: export records and hiring have come apart, so a rising trade figure in the news tells you very little about whether anyone is being hired. If you are choosing what to study or where to look for work, the jobs in this boom sit in the services around it, in software and business services, more than on the assembly line. Watch whether Indonesia's data centre deals come with job numbers attached, because the Malaysian figure suggests they will be small.