In Southeast Asia’s megacities, every new flyover, flood barrier, or railway line is a bet worth billions. Increasingly, those bets are not made on gut feel alone. Cities test these plans first in a digital twin, a virtual copy of the city that lets planners simulate and refine ideas without disrupting real streets or wasting money. The fundamental question for Nordic and ASEAN leaders is no longer whether digital twins work, but how to use them to reduce risks, attract investment, and accelerate solutions for climate resilience and traffic congestion.

Understanding Smart Cities and Their Digital Foundation

Smart cities use sensors, data, and high-speed networks to address everyday challenges. Real-time information helps ease traffic congestion, reduce energy consumption, and respond to emergencies, improving residents’ daily lives.

Digital twins are at the centre of this change. Unlike a dashboard, which shows what’s happening, a digital twin is a living model. It is the difference between a weather report and a flight simulator: one tells you what is, the other lets you try out ideas safely before they go live.

A digital twin is a detailed, up-to-date digital representation of a tangible object, such as a city or a factory. It helps planners test ideas, identify problems in advance, and make improvements without costly trial-and- error.

Singapore’s Digital Twin Reality

Virtual Singapore, launched in 2014 and continuously evolving since, stands as one of the world’s first nation-scale digital twin platforms. It has been developed by Singapore’s government agencies in collaboration with industry partners, integrating tens of terabytes of geospatial data from extensive aerial photography and laser scans to create a dynamic 3D model of the entire city-state.

Informed by years of flood events and infrastructure stresses, officials now use it for traffic optimisation, synchronising GPS, CCTV, and weather data to reduce bus delays and improve flow, as well as for disaster simulations, urban planning, and infrastructure testing.

ASEAN Megacities Prepare to Follow Singapore’s Lead

The ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN), launched in 2018, now connects more than 30 cities—including Jakarta (with over 30 million in its metropolitan area), Bangkok (16 million), Manila, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City—that are committed to technology-driven urban transformation. These megacities incur billions in annual losses from traffic congestion and flooding. Regional initiatives, such as Indonesia’s 100 Smart Cities and Thailand’s nationwide Smart City programme, reflect a shared ambition to address urban challenges at scale, even as progress sometimes lags behind aspirations.

In August 2025, the ERIA: Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia used its ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Forum to gather experts from over 20 cities and showcase digital twins as practical tools for waste management, water resilience, and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As the region’s key policy think tank, ERIA stressed that its role is to help cities turn these technologies into more innovative governance and a greener urban future across ASEAN.

The key point: For ASEAN’s largest cities, Virtual Singapore is not just impressive technology; it is a hands-on guide for tackling their most challenging problems.

Helsinki’s Proven Implementation

Singapore is building a tightly governed national ‘control room’ for its city-state, while Finland is building an open, climate-driven sandbox that developers, researchers, and companies can build on.

Helsinki’s citywide digital twin, managed by Helsinki’s urban environment division and Forum Virium Helsinki, covers more than 500 km², supporting its ambitious 2035 carbon-neutrality goal through detailed laser-scanned 3D models and open data integration.

It simulates sunlight exposure to assess rooftop solar potential, assesses flood risks, maps noise pollution, and evaluates energy-efficiency upgrades, such as insulation or new windows, in districts like Kalasatama.

Across the Nordics, city digital twins are becoming core civic infrastructure. In Sweden, the Digital Twin Cities Centre uses shared 3D twin tools for zoning, construction, and low-carbon design. Norway uses urban twins to monitor roads, tunnels, and public transport, and to model congestion and emissions in cities like Oslo. This technology is now a strategic asset for sustainable urban development, offering models that ASEAN cities can adopt rather than build from scratch.

Engineering the Digital Backbone of Smart Cities

Digital twins require a robust, high-speed connectivity infrastructure capable of handling massive, real-time data flows from thousands of sensors. Nokia‘s LuxTurrim5G project in Espoo is a good example: since 2020, 19 smart poles with 5G and over 250 sensors. Cameras, air-quality monitors, radars, and EV chargers have connected parts of the city and fed live data into digital twin systems to improve safety, transportation, and energy use.

Alongside Nokia, another Nordic telecoms leader, Ericsson, is developing complementary digital twin and advanced network solutions. Ericsson’s Site Digital Twin uses BIM, LiDAR, drone data, and AI to create precise 3D models of telecoms sites for 5G deployment, with scalability to support smart city infrastructure through real-time IoT integration.

VTT Research Centre of Finland ensures that digital twins are accurate, that data from different systems work together seamlessly (interoperability), and that solutions are ready for real-world deployment. Through Smart Tampere pilots, such as self-driving cars, energy-saving streetlights in the Viinikka district, and data-sharing platforms for smarter urban planning, they deliver proven results, succeeding in EU programs like NetZeroCities EU (helping 100 cities reach climate neutrality by 2030). These proven Finnish models are now ready for ASEAN partnerships, building on their showcase at Expo 2025 Osaka.

Finland’s Battle-Tested Infrastructure

Finland’s extreme seasonal variations have driven the development of robust cellular IoT solutions for harsh conditions. Home to Nokia, Finland has a world-leading 95% 5G population coverage and 160% mobile penetration (9M connections for 5.5M people), creating a sophisticated ecosystem. Without this backbone, digital twins would use stale data.

Instead, real-time streams from cars, buildings, and sensors keep models current and actionable.

The Finnish Advantage: Proven Pathways for Collaboration

Finnpartnership: Public Financing That Bridges Markets

Finnpartnership, managed by Finnfund and financed by Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, offers a practical channel for Finnish–ASEAN digital cooperation. The programme provides financial support, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands of euros, for projects that build long-term business partnerships. It focuses on countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines and has clear potential applicability to smart-city collaborations elsewhere in ASEAN, including Thailand and Singapore.

Finnish Technology Already in ASEAN

Finnish companies are establishing credibility in Southeast Asian digital transformation.

Nokia delivers reliable backbone networks and data centre upgrades tailored to ASEAN smart city needs, including Thailand’s EEC 5G slicing via backbone IP/MPLS routers (True Corp since 2020) and AI-upgraded data centres in Malaysia (Maxis/Open DC 2025), which handle massive urban sensor traffic.
Vietnam’s FPT Software partnered with Finland’s Qt Company to accelerate the development of digital tools, including smart city apps for traffic dashboards and IoT sensors, for the ASEAN market.
Miracle SEA brought Finnish Oracle database expertise to Singapore, handling massive data from city cameras and sensors. These partnerships demonstrate that Finnish solutions adapt to ASEAN’s diverse regulatory and technical requirements.

Three Action Pathways for Decision-Makers

Urban Mobility and Smart Transport

ASEAN megacities face crushing congestion. Bangkok is estimated to lose the equivalent of billions of euros annually to traffic delays, with studies suggesting an impact of roughly 1–3% of GDP, depending on methodology. Digital twins allow cities to test new transport policies and infrastructure virtually before committing real money and concrete.

Finnish companies have substantial experience in connected mobility using NB-IoT, LTE-M and 5G, which can complement ASEAN transport pilots. Still, they are part of a broader field that also includes regional and global players.

Jakarta and Bangkok can draw on Singapore’s long-standing traffic simulation and management work, while exploring how proven 5G-based projects, such as Nokia’s LuxTurrim5G, might support future smart-transport deployments.

Climate Resilience and Carbon Reduction

Helsinki’s work on energy savings and flood management offers concrete lessons for ASEAN cities that are already developing their own climate and resilience strategies. The 2011 floods in Thailand, which caused tens of billions of dollars in damage in and around Bangkok, illustrate the cost of trial and error. Rather than reinventing solutions, Southeast Asian cities can draw on Nordic research partners, such as VTT, and other global experts to adapt and scale proven digital twin and climate-resilience methods to their own megacity realities.

Digital Infrastructure and Data Governance

Regional research on digital twins in ASEAN already flags data governance, interoperability and enabling public policy as core implementation challenges, not just technical ones. Finland’s experience with open data under a GDPR-compliant regime offers a practical example of how to combine high transparency with strong privacy and security safeguards, providing a reference for ASEAN policymakers to study and selectively adapt, alongside other global models, when designing their own digital twin and smart city governance frameworks.

What This Means for Your Organisation

For ASEAN City Leaders, digital twins move from pilot experiments to essential urban infrastructure. Start with mobility, floods, or energy. Partner with proven teams like Nokia and VTT to deliver at city scale.

For Nordic Providers, ASEAN seeks reliable, interoperable solutions. Offer connectivity, open data, and climate twins that integrate with existing programmes. Your edge is execution, not vision.

Shared Path Forward Co-own use cases: cut congestion, slash flood losses, reduce emissions. Measure success in budgets saved and votes won.

The Co-Creation Opportunity

The digital twin is not a product; it is your shared test laboratory.

ASEAN brings scale and urgency. The Nordics provide proven infrastructure and data expertise. Finnpartnership funds the pilots.

Digital twins can deliver real wins in flood-resilient infrastructure (testing barriers digitally before the monsoon season), connected urban mobility (5G-optimised rail and bus routes in real time), citizen traffic dashboards (IoT apps delivering live congestion insights), and energy-positive neighbourhoods (scaling climate-adaptive district models).

Where do you see the most significant opportunities? Share your use case ideas in the comments.

Vision Finland: Connecting Finnish innovation with ASEAN’s urban future.