“Our Hong Kong entity had been scheduled for a few years later, but we established it in early 2026,” he said.
“The war has influenced the pace of expansion into East Asian hubs more than it has redrawn the map. Firms that can relocate cheaply have done so,” Bratby said, adding: “Hong Kong and Singapore are now treated as primary growth markets.”
For many, these new Asian bases supplement established operations in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, creating what Anndy Lian, a Singapore-based adviser to governments on blockchain and information technology, calls a “dual-hub” model.
“We are not seeing an outright exodus from the Gulf, but we are witnessing an accelerated shift towards proactive geopolitical hedging,” he said. “Major digital and tech enterprises are no longer content with relying on a single operational anchor.”
Ali Moosa, executive vice-chairman of Bahrain-headquartered Singapore Gulf Bank, said the conflict had accelerated Gulf businesses’ use of Asian financial hubs.
“Business continues during uncertainty,” he said. “Companies still need to pay suppliers, buy equipment, meet payroll and complete projects.”
In the long term, greater access to Asian capital and investment could support growth in the Gulf, Moosa said.
The closer the Gulf becomes to Asia, the more capital Gulf businesses can access and the more opportunities they can pursue- Ali Moosa, Singapore Gulf Bank
“The closer the Gulf becomes to Asia, the more capital Gulf businesses can access and the more opportunities they can pursue,” he said, adding he expected “many of these relationships to continue after the immediate disruption ends”.
The disruption could last for some time, however, as the conflict continues to widen.
At the weekend, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis claimed missile and drone strikes on “sensitive” sites in the Saudi capital Riyadh and on an Aramco facility in the Red Sea oil export hub of Yanbu.
Britain has agreed to help Saudi Arabia’s military counter the Houthis, whose attacks have increasingly threatened shipping near the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint.
Meanwhile, Singaporean financial institutions have been setting up cross-border digital networks and multicurrency settlement methods to carry Gulf capital into a region undergoing an unprecedented infrastructure boom, driven by the race for AI data centre capacity.
Building AI infrastructure was enormously capital intensive, Lian said, pointing to the huge amounts of upfront investment required for high-voltage power grids, industrial cooling systems and the like.
“Middle Eastern institutional capital is uniquely suited to this demand,” he said. “Gulf investors possess deep familiarity with massive, energy-intensive infrastructure projects, and they are deploying liquidity directly into Southeast Asia’s digital backbone.”
The Asia-Pacific’s financial services industry is forecast to nearly double in value to US$4.8 trillion by 2035, according to a Deloitte report published last month – overtaking the United States, whose industry is projected to reach US$4.3 trillion over the same period.
Gulf sovereign wealth funds were hungry for exposure to Asia’s consumer digital economy and industrial supply chains, and Asian fund managers and technology consortiums were more than happy to oblige, Lian said.
Iranian attacks on data centres in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates led to service outages earlier in the conflict, fuelling a surge of interest in Southeast Asian alternatives, said Raj Kapoor, founder of the India Blockchain Alliance.
This had “introduced something that technology companies historically treated as an unlikely tail risk”, he said.
Even so, Kapoor said the Gulf would remain central to the global AI buildout as tech companies had already sunk billions of US dollars into the region, with government backing and it “therefore makes little sense” for them “simply to abandon those markets”.
“So I see this mainly as diversification rather than relocation,” he said.
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author. The latest book is Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence.
