Jardine warns Asia’s data-center boom faces political risks

Asia is pouring money into data centers at a remarkable pace. According to the head of one of the region’s oldest conglomerates, it is also pouring a lot of political risk into the same concrete. Lincoln Pan, CEO of Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd., told the Milken Asia Summit in Singapore on October 9, 2026, that the region’s data-center sector leans heavily on a small group of US technology giants. That concentration, he argued, makes the boom vulnerable to whatever Washington decides next. A boom built on a few big customers Pan’s core concern is dependence. Asia’s data-center business increasingly relies on a limited number of US hyperscalers, the cloud giants that rent out computing power at enormous scale. Pan said the money flowing into data centers and AI large language models represents a concentrated bet. Specifically, it is a bet on the stability of US data policy and on US-China relations. Both, he warned, could be upended by changing government positions in Washington. Jardine went further, describing the operational stability of US-domiciled firms around the world as “highly uncertain.” Pan backed his argument with numbers from a McKinsey report. The consultancy found t...