Survey respondents had cited cloud cost challenges, regulatory risks, multi-cloud management issues, and rising IT edge spending projected through 2028.

Based on a survey conducted through multiple waves in 2024* with various cohorts of Asia-Pacific (APAC) enterprises totaling thousands of respondents, a global internet content delivery and infrastructure firm has shared findings on the evolving digital infrastructure and AI deployment landscape with the media.

First, 31% of respondents from parts of the Asia Pacific region (APAC) had indicated moving generative AI (GenAI) applications into production environments by 2024, while 64% indicated they were in testing or pilot phases for GenAI deployments.

Second, 80% of chief information officers (CIOs) surveyed had cited an intention to rely on edge services provided by cloud vendors by 2027 to support the performance and compliance demands of AI inferencing workloads.

Other findings

Third, 49% of respondents reported challenges managing multi-cloud environments due to inconsistent tools, fragmented data management, and difficulty maintaining updated systems across platforms. Also:

  • 50% of the largest 1,000 organizations in APAC in the survey had indicated anticipating struggles with rapidly evolving and divergent regulatory compliance standards affecting their AI innovation efforts.
  • 24% of respondents had cited unpredictable and rising public cloud costs as a key challenge in their GenAI strategies.
  • Traditional hub-and-spoke cloud models were noted to introduce latency issues unsuitable for production-scale AI workloads.
  • Edge IT spending indicated by respondents representing APAC was projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17% through 2028, with public cloud services at the edge expected to reach a total spend of US$29 billion by that year.

The findings and interpretations were compiled into an “infobrief” that concludes that the enterprises surveyed were actively implementing edge strategies in response to the operational, security, and scalability needs of AI workloads.

According to Parimal Pandya, Senior Vice President (Sales), and Managing Director (Asia-Pacific), Akamai Technologies, the firm that commissioned the infobrief: “AI is only as powerful as the infrastructure it runs on…” and that some respondents in surveyed “Asia-Pacific businesses are adopting more distributed, edge-first infrastructure to meet the performance, security, and cost needs of modern AI workloads.”

*The survey methodology and sample details are not consolidated in a dedicated section and are partially obfuscated across multiple waves of research conducted in 2024. Available information indicates the survey included several regional cohorts within Asia-Pacific, with sample sizes ranging approximately from 30 to 800 respondents per wave, targeting CIOs and IT decision-makers. Regional breakdowns included parts of APAC such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China, and Japan. These figures provide partial transparency into the research scope but do not represent a full, detailed methodological disclosure.