China offers the Global Energy Interconnections as a planetary project to deliver sustainable development and climate action through large-scale energy transition. What does this mean for Southeast Asian countries’ regional quest for greater energy connectivity? Although China-Southeast Asia interconnections promise a durable regional energy connectivity, bringing distant renewable energy to demand centers using GEI technologies, these future energy systems are not free of challenges: technical and political. A closer look at this future interconnection further reveals other chokepoints: politically powerful domestic energy regimes; levels of trust between China and these countries; aging and absent transmission infrastructures; heterogeneous national energy markets and regulations; and differing receptions towards China’s externalization of its surplus industrial capacity.