The ink is barely dry on the three-year deal to keep the LEAP East expo in Hong Kong through 2029, and the self-congratulatory press releases are already treating a tourism win like a Nobel Prize in physics.
We are told that gathering 35,000 attendees at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre "affirms" the city’s status as a global technology power. We are told that bringing a Saudi-born mega-conference to Asia proves the city is the ultimate "super-connector."
It proves nothing of the sort.
Hosting a massive convention does not mean you are building the future. It means you have excellent hotels, efficient public transit, and a government willing to underwrite massive venue fees. There is a profound, systemic delusion sweeping global cities right now: the belief that renting out booth space to companies that build things is the same thing as building things yourself.
I have watched cities spend tens of millions of dollars chasing the circus of international tech festivals, only to realize the circus packs up its tents and leaves on Sunday night. The local economy gets a temporary bump in hotel occupancy and retail spending. The technology ecosystem gets exactly nothing.
The Middleman Trap
The core thesis of the consensus view is that Hong Kong fills a vital gap as a bridge between mainland China and the West, or more recently, between China and the Gulf region. The financial secretary talks up the free flow of capital, data, and talent.
But being a middleman is a dangerous long-term strategy in a digital economy that aggressively deletes middlemen.
When you position your entire economic strategy around being a "super-connector," you are admitting that you do not generate the primary value. You are the cable, not the current. If Saudi investors want to deploy capital into mainland Chinese artificial intelligence firms, or if mainland robotics firms want to expand into Riyadh, they do not need an expensive three-day mixer in Wan Chai to make it happen. They do it because the math works, the technology scales, and the geopolitical alignment makes sense.
Consider a recent observation from the floor of the inaugural LEAP East event: multiple Chinese humanoid robots dancing to draw crowds, with one even dressed in a traditional Saudi shemagh headscarf. It is a neat visual metaphor for a superficial pivot. It looks like collaboration. In reality, it is a superficial marketing stunt designed to flatter regional investors rather than a deep integration of engineering talent.
True technological hubs—think Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, or Tel Aviv—were not built by tourism boards organizing panel discussions with noticeable audio-visual delays. They were built by concentrated, messy, often inward-looking clusters of engineers, researchers, and early-stage capital willing to take existential risks on unproven software and hardware.
The Illusion of Government Funding Schemes
To counter the criticism that the ecosystem lacks depth, officials point to massive capital commitments: over $3.8 billion allocated through various funding schemes to accelerate research and development commercialization.
On paper, the numbers look impressive. In practice, top-down government funding rarely creates top-tier technology companies.
Imagine a scenario where a state-backed fund hands out millions to early-stage enterprises based on compliance checklists, matching grants, and administrative milestones. What you get is not an agile startup hungry for market share; you get an administrative entity that specializes in winning government grants.
I have seen dozens of companies spend years optimizing their pitch decks for bureaucrats rather than customers. They hire professional grant writers instead of senior software architects. The resulting software is built to satisfy a committee, not a market.
True deep tech cannot be forced into existence by a three-year event contract or a multi-billion-dollar subsidy program. It requires friction. It requires a high tolerance for spectacular, public failure—something that highly regulated, risk-averse financial hubs find culturally impossible to stomach.
The Reality of Local vs. Transnational Talent
Let us look at the participant breakdown of these mega-events. The official reports brag that more than half of the attendees at these major gatherings travel from international destinations.
This is presented as a badge of honor. It is actually a symptom of a deeper structural problem.
If your tech ecosystem requires a constant influx of fly-in, fly-out executives to feel vibrant, it means the local root system is remarkably shallow. The domestic market remains stubbornly dominated by real estate, legacy banking, and traditional logistics. The brilliant engineering talent coming out of local universities faces a stark choice: take a comfortable job maintaining a legacy database at an investment bank, or leave.
No amount of international convention-goers will change that equation until the underlying incentive structures change.
Furthermore, the geopolitical realities cannot be wished away by a handshake on an exhibition floor. Squeezed by international tech restrictions and shifting trade dynamics, a city cannot simply declare itself an open international data hub without facing immense scrutiny from both sides. When a market is forced to navigate conflicting regulatory demands, the operating environment becomes complex and unpredictable. Startups do not look for complexity; they look for clarity.
Dismantling the Premise
People often ask: How can a city attract the world's best tech companies?
The very premise of the question is wrong. You do not attract them by building bigger convention centers or signing exclusivity deals with event organizers. You attract them by having an unfair advantage in talent density, regulatory freedom, or raw infrastructure.
Let us look at the technical infrastructure claims being made right now. Projections suggest massive data facility clusters will deliver up to 180,000 PFLOPS of computing power by 2032. That sounds massive. But computing power is becoming a commodity. You can buy compute from anywhere in the world via the cloud. Having the physical servers down the street is no longer the decisive advantage it was twenty years ago.
The real question is: What are you allowed to build on those servers?
If local developers are restricted by tightening oversight on digital tools, interactive software, or AI companionship features—mirroring trends seen across neighboring regions—the creative ceiling is instantly lowered. Creative engineers do not want to work in an environment where their product might be yanked from an app store overnight because it crossed an invisible, moving regulatory line.
The Downside of This Contrarian Approach
To be entirely fair, ignoring the conference circuit has its costs. If a city completely stops hosting these large-scale international events, it loses visibility. It loses the casual networking that occasionally results in an unexpected seed investment. It loses the immediate tourism dollars spent on hotels, fine dining, and entertainment by high-earning business travelers.
But we must stop confusing hospitality metrics with technological progress.
A successful convention industry is a sign of a great service economy. It is not evidence of a thriving innovation ecosystem. When you use hotel occupancy rates to justify the success of your technology policy, you are moving the goalposts because you cannot score a goal on the actual playing field.
The Actionable Alternative
If you are a founder, a venture capitalist, or a policymaker who actually wants to build an authentic, self-sustaining technology hub, you need to abandon the event-driven playbook immediately.
Stop buying expensive booths at conventions to hand out brochures to people who are only there for the free cocktail reception. Stop measuring your ecosystem's health by the number of badges scanned at the door.
Instead, execute a strategy focused on raw utility:
- Divert event budgets into uncapped talent visas. If you are going to spend millions underwriting a conference, use that money to directly subsidize the salaries of the world's top open-source contributors, kernel engineers, and systems architects to live and code locally for five years with zero bureaucratic strings attached.
- Create regulatory safe harbors that actually bite. Do not just create a sandbox for fintech apps to test a minor feature. Create zones with absolute legal immunity for experimental technologies like autonomous flight, decentralized systems, and unconventional clinical trials. Give innovators the legal cover they cannot get anywhere else.
- Build for global markets from day zero. If a local company is designing software tailored specifically to bridge two highly specific regional markets, its growth is inherently capped by the political winds of those two regions. Build products that solve systemic engineering problems for users in San Francisco, Tokyo, Berlin, and Lagos simultaneously.
The era of the regional tech middleman is over. The future belongs to the places that write the code, secure the intellectual property, and ship the product. Everything else is just a very expensive party.
