Looking back at the top tech stories that emerged from Asia-Pacific over the past two decades.
Sep 07, 2025, 09:30pm EDTLooking back at the top tech stories that emerged from Asia-Pacific over the past two decades.and a Silicon Valley resident for five decades, I’ve observed up close the rise of countless tech companies, from Apple, which began in a garage, to Nvidia, launched in a cheap diner.
I’ve also looked across the Pacific and watched the stunning ascent of Asian tech. Here’s my pick of five of the most significant Asian tech stories in the past 20 years.This number, an accepted consensus derived from World Bank and Asian Development Bank data, includes roughly 700 million from China, and 400 million from Southeast Asia. The world has never seen a humanitarian win as big as this, achieved in just two decades. Thank trade and industrialization, infrastructure investment, and leaps in health and education—all accelerated by affordable technology.Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors . These chips power AI, smartphones, advanced military systems, medical devices and supercomputers. This isn’t just market share—it’s choke-point control over the core enabler of modern technology. Without TSMC, global innovation would hit a wall.Platforms need pillars, and for Asia it was the mass affordability of digital phones in the late 1990s. Suddenly, one could bypass computers to access the Web. China’s Alibaba was launched in 1999 and three years later took on eBay, soon vanquishing the American company on its home turf. Alibaba never looked back. China’s Tencent became a force with its messaging and payment app WeChat.Asia’s e-commerce boom quickly spread. Singapore’s Sea started as a gaming company in 2009, then “gamified” the shopping experience with Shopee. Likewise, the Indonesian juggernaut GoTo was a marriage of skills, ride-hailing from Gojek and e-commerce from Tokopedia.China’s tech success over the past 20 years was really achieved in three phases. The first, consumer internet apps, leveraged China’s huge internet population to build e-commerce, payments and social media. Beijing’s concerns over the outsize market influence of these internet giants spurred the next phase: In 2019, President Xi Jinping redirected China toward strategic technologies: chips, aerospace, AI hardware and robotics. Phase three is now underway with China’s open-source approach to AI. The idea is to tap China’s vast population of AI programmers to make up for the mainland’s lack of access to expensive American AI chips, such as Nvidia’s. Chinese AI companies to watch include DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Baidu’s Ernie Bot.In the early 2000s, pioneering firms like GGV Capital and IDG Capital imported Silicon Valley’s venture playbook—multistage funding, board guidance and equity-for-pay. Shanghai’s Qiming Venture Partners, founded in 2006, rode the mobile wave, investing early in companies like Xiaomi, Meituan and Bilibili. Singapore saw similar VC growth: East Ventures invested in Kudo, acquired by Grab; and in Loket, bought by Gojek. By 2020, top Asian VCs were leading billion-dollar valuation rounds for AI, fintech and healthtech companies. Competition with global giants like Silicon Valley’s Sequoia and Japan’s SoftBank intensified. In this decade, sovereign wealth funds like Temasek and family offices have expanded their venture arms. It’s a good bet the AI boom in the years ahead will draw in more money from state-owned megafunds and the mega-rich.
Innovation TSMC Alibaba Wechat Shopee Gojek Goto Tokopedia AI
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