Asia Pacific's telcos want to be enterprise IT providers too

Behind GSMA's US$1.4 trillion forecast is a quieter shift: operators selling security, cloud and AI services.

According to GSMA's Mobile Economy Asia Pacific 2026 report, mobile technologies and services are projected to contribute US$1.4 trillion to the region's economy by 2030, up 40% from around US$1 trillion currently.

While that number is large, the strategy behind it is the more interesting story. The report clearly reveals a consistent pattern emerging whereby telcos in APAC are no longer content to sell connectivity and lease capacity to hyperscalers.

Instead, telcos in the region are also building positions across compute, cloud orchestration, managed security, and packaged enterprise AI. A deliberate move up the value chain, telcos simply want a piece of the pie of a market where enterprises have traditionally bought from IT vendors and service providers.

From pipes to platforms

The commercial logic is straightforward. Operator capex across the region is forecast at more than US$213 billion between 2025 and 2030, while revenues are expected to grow only modestly, from US$201 billion in 2025 to US$224 billion by the end of the decade. Connectivity alone cannot justify the spending. Enterprise services can.

The report catalogues where that push is landing. Singtel, with KKR, has moved to take full control of STT Global Data Centers, a platform with roughly 2.3GW of design capacity across 12 markets. Airtel's data center arm Nxtra raised US$1 billion in March to expand its footprint. SoftBank launched an AI cloud operating system in January to make distributed operator infrastructure programmable, while SK Telecom is building a managed AI infrastructure stack for GPU partitioning and workload management.

Further up the stack, the offerings start to resemble those of established enterprise software players. KT has unveiled agent-building tools designed to help businesses deploy AI across workflows using templates and no-code interfaces. Telkom Indonesia is pairing a ZTE partnership with an AI center of excellence targeting enterprise and government accounts. The pull, according to GSMA Intelligence, is coming largely from SMEs seeking faster deployment and lower implementation risk, a segment where operators' existing reach, billing relationships and managed ICT capabilities give them a head start many software vendors would envy.

Security becomes the wedge

Cybersecurity is where ambition is most visible. The report cites IDC forecasts putting Asia Pacific security spending at US$60.6 billion by 2028, growing at a compound rate above 10%, and operators are positioning to capture a share of it as a service business rather than treating security as network hygiene.

Airtel Business launched a fully managed zero-trust platform in May. KDDI and its security subsidiary LAC have expanded global managed security services. StarHub has bundled Vectra AI's threat detection platform into its enterprise cybersecurity portfolio in Singapore. SoftBank has gone further still, launching a vulnerability patching service developed with OpenAI for Japan's critical infrastructure.

Behind the commercial opportunity sits in genuine urgency. GSMA consumer research found the share of ASEAN consumers who report ever having been scammed jumped from 31% in 2024 to 45% in 2025, with generative AI making fraud harder to detect through voice cloning and deepfake customer-service chats. Singapore logged US$706 million in scam and cybercrime losses last year; Australia exceeded US$1.38 billion. Operators sit on the network and messaging data that makes early detection possible, and they are converting that vantage point into a product.

The caveat worth remembering

For all the trillion-dollar framing, the report is candid about the region's unfinished business: more than 700 million adults remain offline despite living under mobile broadband coverage, and Southeast Asia's 5G adoption is projected to reach just 43% by 2030, well behind the 91% expected in developed Asia Pacific markets.

Those gaps will shape where enterprise demand actually materializes, and they are a useful check on the report's own optimism. A US$1.4 trillion forecast assumes the region's operators can complete a transformation that is still in its early innings, from selling connections to selling outcomes. The infrastructure spending clearly indicates that they are serious.

For enterprises, IT services from telcos could be a better way of avoiding vendor lock ins and also have better options. While the SMB segment of the industry is definitely seeing value from this, for larger enterprises, it may still need a lot more convincing.