Thu Huong Le · · 5 min readSoutheast Asia grows up
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Hello reader,
Last week, I went to Dubai for the joint Gitex Global and Expand North Star event, an expo that combined two of the world’s largest tech gatherings.
The numbers were staggering: 6,800 exhibitors, 2,000 startups from 180 countries, and 1,200 investors packed into the Dubai World Trade Center and Dubai Harbour. Some 50,000 people descended on the city, and yes, the traffic lived up to the hype.
Dubai has long been known for its appetite for grandeur: it has the tallest building, the biggest mall, the flashiest skyline. But it’s not until you’re there that you truly grasp the scale of its ambition, and of these events.
Walking from one hall to another could easily span a kilometer, and I felt trapped amid endless booths, flashing screens, and AI-branded displays. After a while, it all started to blur together.
The two events make most tech gatherings in Southeast Asia feel minuscule in comparison.
However, if that many innovators and tech leaders gather in one place, you’d expect some major announcements to follow. Instead, most of Gitex’s press releases in my inbox were about the event itself, its expansion into new countries, summaries of high-level discussions, and the least surprising headline of all: AI is at the center of everything.
Even the hottest item on the agenda, a virtual chat with Sam Altman, offered virtually no surprising insights. It left me wondering whether scale truly makes something better.
I think Southeast Asia doesn’t need to compete with Dubai on scale. Yes, the region has seen a wave of bad news lately, and expectations for its tech ecosystem have rarely been lower.
We don’t need bigger events. We need deeper conversations and unconventional investors who are willing to back unconventional companies. As today’s Insights story suggests, these backers could easily come from Indonesia’s family offices, which sit on vast amounts of wealth.
Thu Huong Le, managing editor
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