There’s no better job than reporting, and reporting on topics that don’t get the attention they deserve. I remember when Rest of World launched in 2020 with its founder, the daughter of a major tech executive, promising to spend as much as $60 million to fund it. The tough reality of media has caught up now though, as we explore today.

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Rest of World could shut shop in early 2027

There are few media outlets that cover technology and the digital world in Asia, and the list may be about to lose another member based on reports that Rest of World may close down at the end of January.

Semafor reports that founder Sophie Schmidt emailed the publication’s donors, which have helped fund it since its launch six years ago, to explain that it has “begun the search for a new institutional home.” Talks with potential acquirers are ongoing, but Schmidt is preparing to close the outlet at the end of January.

Rest of World has been impacted by a decline in traffic from search, social media and other digital channels. A number of key personnel have left recently, including former editor-in-chief Anup Kaphle who exited in March. At the same time, its editorial focus has redoubled around core topics like AI and China with less of a focus on under-served regions like Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America which it came out of the gate covering in detail back in 2020.

Semafor explains more:

Around the beginning of the second Trump administration, Rest of World saw a sharp decline in online web traffic, prompting concern from its leadership and a scramble to hold onto its audiences. The organization reprioritized Western readers in an attempt to sharpen its connection with the audience most likely to read its content, and chose to focus coverage on regions it believed remained true to its mission but would more easily appeal to American readers, like China.

(Ironically, Schmidt’s father, Eric, played a key role in making Google the giant it is today.)

Surprisingly, Rest of World didn’t make a dent in video reporting despite its lucrative war chest. Even in just six years, you’d imagine that the publication would look a lot different if it were to be launched today. A smaller team, more interactive approach and other strategies might have made it leaner and punching harder.

I know well that building a tech-focused media business covering topics and regions outside of Silicon Valley is a tough challenge. It’s one that’s got harder since I left The Ken in 2022. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d cover Southeast Asia or the wider Asian region in today’s era in which AI dominates the discourse, with a venture capital winter across much of the region.

The Ken just turned 10 years old and the difference between it and challenger media is the business model. Rest of World didn’t venture into subscriptions, but it would have been a tough challenge. Free-to-read media struggle to pivot into paid content because often they keep some articles available to read to retain traffic, awareness and try to upsell readers.

The Ken’s open secret is a hard paywall. You know what you get, and what you won’t get. Most people will bounce at a paywall that gives no freebies beyond a small preview of each article, but those who do pay are strongly incentivised. Offering quarterly, six-monthly and annual subscriptions only means that churn is less of an issue than weekly, monthly or even daily options.

Rest of World has done valuable work over the last six years, and I’ll be keenly watching to see where it finds a new home. Media has always been a tough industry, but it’s never been harder than it is today.

Update: Rest of World deputy editor Rina Chandran confirmed on LinkedIn that the publication will close.

Yes, it’s true: Rest of World is shutting down. After six years of award-winning reporting, our leadership is searching for a new home for the publication that was launched to cover innovation outside the West. It has been my great privilege to be a part of this journey, first in Bangkok as Southeast Asia editor, and then in San Francisco as a deputy editor writing about how tech that’s built in Silicon Valley affects the rest of the world. Along the way, I’ve worked with dozens of freelancers, columnists and our own brilliant reporters and editors, and loved every minute of it.

What happens next? We will continue to publish till end-Jan. If you are a freelancer or columnist who has already been commissioned, you’re good! Your work will be preserved and continue to be accessible. To all of you, and to our many donors and supporters, thank you for being a part of Rest of World.

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Deals

Toyota is planning to deploy 400,000 robots under a $6.4 billion annual investment programme, while its Walden Robotics spinout raised $300 million at a $1.1 billion valuation in July [FT]

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has selected sites in Malaysia for $50 billion of planned technology investment, including data centres [Bloomberg]

Markets

SK Hynix plans a 16 trillion won ($12 billion) special dividend, returning 80% of its gains from the Kioxia stake sale to shareholders [Bloomberg]

Meanwhile, SK Hynix has scrapped a planned US listing for its Solidigm unit after shareholder opposition and regulatory scrutiny over minority investor protections [Bloomberg]

Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing raised HK$9.9 billion ($1.3 billion) in Hong Kong’s largest listing in almost two months, even as AI infrastructure stocks face a volatile market [Bloomberg]

China’s CSI Artificial Intelligence Index has fallen nearly 40% from its June peak as investors question AI profits and US market weakness hits Chinese chip suppliers [Nikkei Asia]

Earnings

Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon reported third-quarter net profit of 1.4 billion yuan ($210 million), up 147.7%, as revenue more than doubled to 3.5 billion yuan ($525 million) [SCMP]

AI and Chips

SK Hyper, SK Group’s data centre arm, is seeking funding for a 15-gigawatt South Korean buildout through 2035, with its first 5-gigawatt phase estimated to cost $350 billion [Bloomberg]

South Korea plans to invest $1 trillion in Gwangju to turn the southwestern city into a technology hub and spread AI-led growth beyond Seoul [Nikkei Asia]

Asia-Pacific AI agent software revenue is forecast to rise more than 14-fold to $11.2 billion by 2030, from $782 million this year, as Chinese companies push automation into office and industrial work [SCMP]

China has approved DeepSeek and MiniMax AI models for overseas deployment as Beijing prepares export controls for certain AI tools and services [Bloomberg]

inDrive is partnering with Pony.ai and Nvidia to test robotaxis in Kazakhstan from the first half of 2027 [TechCrunch]

Moonshot AI launches Kimi K3.1 Pro, an open-weight model with a 1 million-token context window and new coding, 3D creation, financial-research and agent features [Kimi]

But Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.1 Pro faces questions over purported influencer instructions that discouraged disclosure of paid partnerships [VentureBeat]

Moonshot AI says it stripped cyber-offensive data from Kimi K3.1 Pro’s training and reinforcement-learning environments while keeping its general coding skills [Reuters]

Asia’s AI data-centre boom is meeting a tougher public market as stalled IPOs, volatile debuts, debt costs and construction delays test expansion plans [Nikkei Asia]

ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are recruiting more forward-deployed engineers to help customers turn AI models into working products, with pay packages nearing 1 million yuan ($149,739) a year [SCMP]

Crypto

Indian exchange CoinDCX lost 15.99 million USDT after an automated system failed to move funds from deposit wallets compromised in its July 2025 hack [The Block]

Malaysia’s and Thailand’s central banks have joined Singapore’s BLOOM initiative to develop cross-border payments using regulated stablecoins and tokenised bank deposits [The Block]

Policy

A failed deal between Ramp and rival Airwallex has prompted Ramp’s politically connected investors to press Washington to investigate Airwallex’s alleged ties to the Chinese government [The Information]

The US Federal Communications Commission has blocked two devices containing HiSilicon surveillance chips, its first use of new powers targeting foreign surveillance technology [Reuters]

The Trump administration has proposed tighter scrutiny of US investments in Chinese advanced chips, AI, biotechnology and other sensitive sectors [Financial Times]

Shein has agreed to pay $100 million to settle a US Federal Trade Commission investigation into delivery delays and customer complaints [Reuters]

Malaysia may widen its ban on civil servants using Google’s Waze over concerns around government information and personal data [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Tata Electronics is exploring glass-based enclosures and specialised metal components as it looks beyond iPhone casings and moves into higher-value Apple manufacturing in India [Economic Times]

CATL and BAIC plan a battery-swapping system for 1 million vehicles, with BAIC adding compatible models to CATL’s Choco-Swap network [Bloomberg]

Grab’s planned expansion into Taiwan, its first move outside of Southeast Asia, is dead after its deal to acquire Foodpanda was blocked by the competition commission. Grab and Uber are rivals, but their close links, including ownership and board membership, raise sufficient concern that the impact would be negative.

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Grab’s past with Uber comes back to haunt it

Grab’s plan to expand into Taiwan appears to be over after the country’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) blocked its planned $600 million acquisition of delivery business Foodpanda.

The deal was announced in March and it looked like it would finally see Europe-based Delivery Hero dispose of its Taiwan-based business, which was originally set to be acquired by Uber for $950 million back in 2024. That Uber deal was struck down on anti-competition grounds, and it is a very similar story again here.

Uber buying Foodpanda Taiwan would have given the US firm a monopoly in the country, and while that wouldn’t be the case for Grab, since it would be entering the country for the first time, the FTC was uneasy with the relationship between the two companies.

Its ruling noted that Uber’s 13.1% ownership stake in Grab could reduce the incentive for Grab and Uber Eats to compete hard on prices, promotions and service. It highlighted the two companies’ previous commercial ties, which include the sale of Uber’s Southeast Asian business to Grab in 2018 and Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s past role on Grab’s board of directors, as a major concern and said Taiwan’s high barriers to entry made the risk worse.

Grab proposed options to remedy the situation, including diluting Uber’s stake and limiting sensitive-information sharing, but they were rejected by the commission.

It’s not clear whether the companies will appeal the ruling. Grab told Focus Taiwan it was disappointed by the outcome. Delivery Hero noted it has a break fee for the deal not concluding, but it didn’t specify whether that will come into force.

Grab’s case was undoubtedly not helped by a series of protests across Southeast Asia in response to the company’s fees. Protests started in Indonesia in late August after a Grab driver died after being caught up in a police clash during cost of living protests while delivering an order, and unrest spread to Vietnam where drivers called for a protest in September.

The proposed venture into Taiwan was part of a major investment spree from Grab this year which has included doubling down on financial services with the acquisition of buy-now-pay-later product Atome for an initial $1.5 billion, and the acquisition of US-based investment app Stash. Grab has also consolidated its Indonesia-based bank into its overall operations, too. (Disclaimer: Atome is an Ellerton client.)

This week’s update means we won’t find out what this foray outside of Southeast Asia can do for Grab’s business. Taiwan remains the jewel in Foodpanda’s Asia business, which Delivery Hero has been looking to dispose of for some time. It shut down its operations in Thailand, and has struggled to find buyers for the business in other parts of Southeast Asia.

The issue in Taiwan isn’t finding a buyer, as we can see, just structuring a deal that is deemed to be acceptable. There’s been talk of Foodpanda exiting Taiwan entirely, but that’s unlikely given that the business remains a valuable asset.

So much for Grab and Uber resuming their direct rivalry. That will have to wait for another time and another country.

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DeepSeek raises another $15 billion from investors

DeepSeek has closed its second funding round of the year after pulling in $15 billion with battery giant CATL and Tencent among the leading investors, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal follows the Chinese AI firm raising $7.4 billion back in June.

Unlike AI companies from the US and other regions, Chinese firms are rarely public with their funding and other numbers. The details get out via media which can make them difficult to track. In this case, WSJ reports that the company is working to go public through an IPO as soon as next year. That, it claims, could see it beat domestic rival Moonshot AI as well as Anthropic and OpenAI in becoming a listed company.

That would be one hell of a trajectory for a business that, prior to this summer, was entirely bootstrapped by its founder, hedge fund owner Liang Wenfeng.

DeepSeek’s investors are said to also include investment firms Monolith Management and Shixiang, PE firm Stony Creek Capital, Lenovo-owned Legend Capital, and Chinese carmaker Geely. Its valuation appears to have surpassed $79 billion, and the company’s annualised revenue run rate (ARR) is now at more than $1 billion.

Beyond the funding, DeepSeek is increasingly working with Huawei to optimise its service on Chinese AI chips. The two firms are said to be working together to optimise Huawei’s Ascend processors with the ultimate goal of creating a domestic computing ecosystem with significantly reduced reliance on Nvidia’s technology and other non-Chinese components.

All in all, DeepSeek looks like a very different company to the one that burst on the scene with a capable model that was built with less investment and compute power than its rivals.

Deals

The Private Infrastructure Development Group exited Vietnamese electric-motorbike startup Dat Bike after the company redeemed its $4 million convertible loan, following a $26 million Series B round [TechNode]

Markets

Singapore-based DayOne Data Centers is weighing a smaller US IPO of $2.5 billion to $3 billion, roughly half its original target, after volatility hit data-centre stocks [Bloomberg]

Prism, the parent of Indian budget-hotel chain Oyo, cut its planned IPO to 33.5 billion rupees ($354.65 million), nearly half the 66.5 billion rupees it proposed in June [Reuters]

Chinese humanoid-robot maker Noetix Robotics confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise several hundred million dollars and happen as early as next year [Bloomberg]

South Korean entertainment platform Korai Flix will go public in the US through a $3.5 billion SPAC merger, after attracting about 26 million users across 15 Asian markets with AI-generated short dramas and companion avatars [Reuters]

AI and Chips

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security asked Samsung to work on chips for security equipment, AI-powered file analysis and biometric-recognition software [Nikkei Asia]

Moonshot AI is expanding into Singapore, where it is hiring for a sales role to build revenue, partnerships and market presence [Reuters]

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are upgrading their China factories to make more advanced memory chips, looking to meet AI demand while holding off local rival YMTC [Reuters]

Microsoft said China-aligned group Storm-0940 used the ARTEX AI penetration-testing framework to target hundreds of organisations globally, gaining privileged cloud access in some cases within three hours [Microsoft]

Eternal, the parent of Zomato and Blinkit, launched dark.ai, a privacy-focused platform that runs public AI models on its own infrastructure and offers user-controlled chat memory [Bloomberg]

Japan selected Preferred Networks and Tenstorrent for a five-year project to develop an advanced computing platform combining chiplets, photonics-electronics integration and advanced packaging [TechNode]

US tech companies building data centres in India are facing rising opposition over water, power and land use, as the government considers a national data-centre policy [CNBC]

Malaysian chip designer SkyeChip joined SoftBank-backed Saimemory’s Z-Angle Memory project in Japan to develop next-generation memory for AI data centres [Nikkei Asia]

Japanese AI startup EpicAI plans to deploy software at several automakers from next spring to speed up vehicle-design reviews and help them compete with faster-moving Chinese EV rivals [Nikkei Asia]

Israeli security firm Lava said it found 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips linked to China Telecom, despite US export controls barring their sale to China [The Information]

Samsung Electro-Mechanics will receive 3.7 trillion won ($2.8 billion) in investment from Tesla and Nvidia for facilities making advanced chip substrates for AI semiconductors [Reuters]

Policy

China accused the US of discrimination under the guise of national security after Washington barred DeepSeek products from the technology systems of many federal agencies [NYT]

Malaysia’s government-backed TuJu navigation app is drawing criticism over unreliable directions and a lack of real-time traffic updates after officials were barred from using Waze [Bloomberg]

Indian digital-trust provider eMudhra will exit the global SSL/TLS certificate business after weak cryptographic key generation exposed private keys for eight intermediate certificate authorities and prompted major browsers to block them [Economic Times]

TSMC is exploring alternatives to rare-earth components in factory equipment to reduce disruption risks from China’s export controls [Reuters]

Japanese companies, including banks and airlines, took digital services offline as they assessed vulnerabilities in the widely used PHP programming language and rushed to install patches [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Southeast Asia’s digital economy is expected to grow 17% to $368 billion this year, as AI helps support consumer spending despite inflation and weaker demand [e-Conomy SEA 2026]

Chinese battery makers and their suppliers announced $12 billion in overseas investments across 14 deals this year, taking their expansion since 2023 to almost $90 billion [FT]

State Bank of India is investigating a suspected cyberattack after finding nearly 4,000 records containing customers’ personal information on the dark web [Bloomberg]

Tesla partnered with Ant Group to integrate Alipay into its cars in China, starting with a smart-parking service as it adds local features in a crowded EV market [SCMP]

A union representing Micron workers in Taoyuan launched Taiwan’s first semiconductor-industry strike, demanding regular profit-sharing during the AI-driven chip boom [Nikkei Asia]

Sea showed its ambition with news that it is planning to spinout and list its fast-growing fintech business, and also launch a cloud computing business. These two strategies show why it is Southeast Asia’s top tech company, but they worried investors and sent the share price tumbling.

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Sea shows new levels of ambition with decades-late entry into cloud computing

Sea is making major moves after reports emerged that it is launching a cloud computing business and is planning a public listing for its fintech arm, Monee, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg.

Less than one day after Southeast Asia notched its largest fintech IPO ever, as Philippines-based Mynt raised nearly $1 billion from a domestic listing, Sea could be the next. We’ve written about Monee’s impressive growth. The business covers payments and lending, and its nearly 60% annual revenue growth has made it double the size of Sea’s trusty Garena games business when it comes to sales.

Monee is clearly Sea’s next growth lever, as we wrote in August:

Shopee continues to account for over 60% of all revenue, and it is clearly the big focus, but Monee has the scope to grow strongly.

“Only a fraction of the users across our ecosystem are using Monee’s financial products today, and credit penetration remains low across our markets,” Sea chairman and CEO Forrest Li said in a statement.

But rather than capture the value fully inside Sea, the company believes Monee needs its own space to breathe. Monee will get “resources and the room to go further ​and faster than it can today,” Sea founder Forrest ⁠Li wrote in a memo to employees. This is in contrast to Grab’s recent move to acquire fintech lender Atome for $1.5 billion and integrate its business into its company. [Disclosure: Atome is an Ellerton & Co. client]

Investors don’t agree, for now at least. Sea’s share price fell by over 9% on the news.

That may also be linked to the second revelation, that Sea is creating its own cloud computing business. The company is copying the Amazon-AWS and Alibaba-Alibaba Cloud playbook. That has huge potential, but it will come at cost.

AWS was famously an expensive venture for Amazon when it launched in 2006, while Alibaba joined three years later at considerable cost. But these two business units have been strong growth engines for both companies:

• AWS now has a $169 billion annualised revenue run rate

• Alibaba Cloud is the centrepiece of the Chinese firm’s AI and compute services division, which saw revenue rise 45% year-on-year to reach 48.44 billion CNY ($7.15 billion) in the June 2026 quarter

Sea has never been shy to invest in long-term strategies, and this is clearly the ultimate one. Despite being decades late to the cloud, it is betting that there’s room to make money as AI expands demand for affordable and quality compute services.

That’s a major gamble, and certainly the most ambitious plan a Southeast Asia-based tech company has ever made. That’s not exactly what I meant when I called Sea “Southeast Asia’s true internet giant,” but it certainly deserves it based on this newfound ambition.

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GoTo launches impressive new LLM for Indonesia

Meanwhile in Indonesia, GoTo released a major LLM for the local market. Sure, this isn’t cloud computing or a spinout IPO, but it is meaningful for developing a powerful and local model that’s specifically for Bahasa Indonesia and regional languages in Southeast Asia.

“GoTo-AI is a collection of Large Language Models (LLMs) which have been pretrained and instruct-tuned for Indonesian culture and languages. GoTo-AI-Gemma-3-27B-IT leverages the Gemma-3 architecture alongside specialized local models,” reads its description on popular AI database Hugging Face.

GoTo worked with universities, government agencies and media organisations to build the dataset, the company told Business Times. It claims it achieved its highest overall score across five Indonesian languages, and it outperformed its previous model despite being less than half the size.

We’ve written before that Southeast Asia is worryingly ill-equipped to deal with the digital sovereignty crisis that is emerging from using international products, including LLMs, and computing services that are not native to the region. Sea’s cloud computing business and this GoTo AI model are promising responses, but much more needs to be done.

Deals

Foxconn will pay 115 billion yen ($727 million) for a 50% stake in Mitsubishi Electric’s automotive-components business, pairing Mitsubishi’s expertise in electric powertrains and in-car systems with Foxconn’s electric-vehicle ambitions [Nikkei Asia]

Indian healthcare startup Even Healthcare raised $50 million in a Khosla Ventures-led Series B that values it at $300 million, three times its valuation 18 months ago, as it expands from insurance into running hospitals [TechCrunch]

Chinese autonomous-delivery company Neolix raised $400 million in a Boyu Capital-led Series E, taking its total funding past $1.4 billion [Bloomberg]

Markets

South Korean neocloud provider Elice raised 201 billion won ($151 million) in the year’s biggest Kosdaq IPO, it fell as much as 32% in its trading debut before rebounding the next day [Bloomberg]

Mynt, the operator of Philippine payments app GCash, rose as much as 2.1% in its market debut after selling 8.03 billion shares and raising 53 billion pesos ($840 million) in the base offering [Reuters]

Shares in Chinese memory-chip maker ChangXin Memory Technologies fell 7.8% in a global chip sell-off despite its forecast of up to $19.8 billion in net income for the first nine months of 2026 [SCMP]

AI and Chips

Chinese AI startup MiniMax updated its M3.1 Flash model, claiming nearly three times faster inference and 70% lower costs for agent, coding and cybersecurity work [MiniMax]

Researchers found that AI agents powered by DeepSeek and Claude Code were used to breach more than 100 companies, with one campaign targeting more than 1,200 ecommerce sites for an estimated $5,000 in tokens [Reuters]

DeepSeek is said to be working with Huawei on AI chips due next year, with Huawei engineers embedded at the startup to shape designs around how its models process and move data [The Information]

In more official news, DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its V4.1-Flash model, to help developers reduce latency, computing costs and energy use [GitHub]

Indian chemical companies are looking to enter semiconductor supply chains as Tata targets chip production by mid-2028, but many still lack the ultra-high-purity technology and customer access chipmakers require [Nikkei Asia]

South Korea plans to invest 1,350 trillion won ($1 trillion) in its southwest, including four semiconductor plants costing 800 trillion won ($593 billion) in Gwangju, with production targeted for 2030 [Bloomberg]

Alibaba’s Damo Academy has shipped more than 6 billion chips based on its XuanTie RISC-V architecture as China looks for alternatives to Arm and Intel under US export controls [SCMP]

Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are investing in data centres in Shaoguan, Guangdong, where cheaper electricity, ample land and a cooler climate are drawing computing capacity inland [FT]

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards worth over $35 billion as they seek export-compliant chips [Reuters]

ARTEX, the Chinese AI tool linked to breaches at South Korean banks last month, was also used in cyberattacks on about 20 Japanese companies, with eight reporting data leaks [Bloomberg]

Policy

The US sanctioned Chinese venture firm MiraclePlus and three affiliates over allegations that they financed a startup accused of stealing Google AI trade secrets [Bloomberg]

The US Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek technology from their IT systems and barred future purchases of the Chinese company’s products [WSJ]

Japan will certify the security of data centres and cloud services as it tries to encourage their use in sensitive sectors while curbing risks linked to China and Russia [Nikkei Asia]

Four Z.ai founders worked on a research project with an institute the UK government says has close links to China’s main spy agency, according to records seen by Bloomberg [Bloomberg]

Japan is months away from exhausting supplies of yttrium, a metal used in automotive, defence and semiconductor products, and has asked Washington to press Beijing to ease export controls [FT]

China launched the state-owned National Data Group in Xiongan to develop data resources and promote sharing across industries and regions [Reuters]

In other news:

Apple has made more money than Samsung in India for the first time after the US firm’s operating revenue rose 31% to ₹1.04 lakh crore ($12.5 billion) in FY26, while Samsung’s mobile-phone revenue in India fell 1.4% to ₹81,472 crore ($9.8 billion) [Economic Times]

Flipkart is testing a food-delivery service with more than 8,000 employees ahead of a potential challenge to Zomato and Swiggy, using its Ekart logistics arm and the government-backed ONDC network [TechCrunch]

The US-China AI race is becoming a contest over computing infrastructure, technological innovation and military power, with the outcome likely to shape who writes the rules for the AI era [Foreign Affairs]

There aren’t many exits in Southeast Asia, so today’s chance to analyse two IPOs is a rare one. We explore how data centre firm DayOne epitomises the upside/downside of the AI opportunity after it revealed two companies account for 85% of its revenue. We also look at how Mynt is about to have the largest IPO in the Philippines, unless you look at US dollar value.

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DayOne says one company accounts for 70% of its revenue: it’s TikTok

In more IPO news from Southeast Asia, data centre operator DayOne is moving ahead with an IPO in New York that could raise up to $5 billion and one particular disclosure in its filing documents stands out.

Most notably, it revealed that one client accounts for nearly 70% of revenue. The Information names that client as ByteDance (TikTok) and it certainly appears that way from DayOne’s own words, emphasis ours:

In 2025 and the six months ended June 30, 2026, our largest customer, a global technology company with a leading short-form video platform serving a worldwide audience, accounted for 69.4% and 69.2%, respectively, of our revenue and our second largest customer represented 12.3% and 15.1%, respectively, of our revenue.

So 85% of revenue comes from two clients.

That’s a rough read, but not a huge shock given that the data centre business is built on long-term customer commitments. You don’t go through the process of acquiring land, developing a centre and all the associated costs without the certainty of revenue. ByteDance and GDS, the parent company behind DayOne, have a long relationship dating back to 2020 when GDS first won the company as a client in China. It created its international business, which became DayOne, in 2022. You’d imagine that a key part was securing ByteDance, which was rapidly expanding overseas with Southeast Asia a key market.

A client like TikTok, which has pledged to spend as much as $25 billion on data centres in Southeast Asia, is clearly potentially very lucrative, but the reliance feeds into concern around the potential impact of an AI bubble.

If the bubble pops, data centre players like DayOne stand to be hurt significantly, as the company itself admits.

“Accordingly, our business has been and we expect will continue to be highly dependent on our relationships with our customers and we expect such customers to continue to account for a large percentage of our revenues and capacity,” it wrote.

DayOne’s revenue climbed from $178.1 million in 2024 to $484.3 million in 2025. That revenue growth continues to accelerate, reaching $512.0 million in the first half of 2026, up from $151.5 million a year earlier. The company remains loss-making with a net loss of $367.1 million in 2025, though it cut that to just $77.2 million in the first half of 2026.

If it takes even a partial slice of TikTok’s $25 billion commitment (assuming the company can even spend that much in the region) it stands to be a huge winner for investors. Let alone if it can grab even more market share based on the prestige of serving such major businesses.

DayOne is said to be aiming for a $20 billion valuation. It claims to work with seven major clients that are tech companies or hyperscalers, with 33% market share in Southeast Asia. It’s a major player in a category that hasn’t been strongly tested in public markets, how will that go?

We’ve already seen how skittish investors can be with Firmus’ $5.5 billion IPO collapsing, despite its backing from Nvidia and others, while AirTrunk is said to have delayed its $1.5 billion Singapore listing. DayOne will believe it is different, and a name like TikTok might help it make the case.

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Mynt prepares for the Philippines’ largest IPO (but not in US dollars)

The Philippines is set for a record IPO tomorrow as Mynt, the parent company of GCash, the country’s top digital payments app, will begin trading on 20 October.

The listing is set to raise up to 60.9 billion pesos ($966 million) if the full option for shares is exercised. That’s below the initial range Mynt forecast, but it would be enough to be a national record. F&B brand Monde Nissin, famous for instant noodles, biscuits and more, raised 48.6 billion pesos in its 2021 IPO, which was supported by Singapore’s GIC among others.

In a sign of currency depreciation, Mynt’s IPO could be larger in pesos but lower than Monde Nissin in US dollar terms as the Philippine peso has lost 24% of its dollar value during the period.

Still, Mynt’s listing represents a signal of opportunity for digital business and startups in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia.

While it is true that Mynt is a corporate animal, having been formed by conglomerate Ayala and operator Globe Telecom and backed by the likes of MUFG, Ant Group and Warburg Pincus, others in the space need to point to successful listings and exits if they’re to follow the same path. It’s not clear what employee stock options are like or how large the ESOP pool is, but you’d hope that a good portion of the exit will be shared internally among staff.

Exits are what feeds an ecosystem. They allow investors to return funds (a real challenge in Southeast Asia) and employees to make financial gains that justify the decision to work at a startup rather than taking a corporate job. Often, these staff jump out and form new companies, become angel investors or even start their own funds full time, all of which makes the startup landscape richer.

Employees at corporate startups like Ayala are unlikely to have life-changing wealth from the listing, the incentives there don’t work like that and an IPO is usually a firm target, but it may be a boost to outside investors looking into the Philippines and give other companies in the country cause to believe they, too, can make it to a domestic IPO. The more companies that do it, the more those ecosystem effects will be felt.

The listing should also serve to inspire a country like Thailand, where another payments player backed by Ant, Ascend Money, is said to be considering an IPO. Back in the Philippines, GCash’s rival, Maya, is said to be weighing a listing in 2027. The momentum generated by tomorrow’s listing could be powerful.

Deals

SoftBank is weighing an acquisition of US security-services group Allied Universal that could value the business at about $30 billion including debt, as Masayoshi Son looks to deploy AI-powered robots in physical security [Bloomberg]

Hyderabad- and Austin-based RapidCanvas raised $29 million, taking total funding to $52.5 million, to combine AI agents and engineers for custom enterprise software [Economic Times]

Accenture is reviewing a potential sale of its Greater China operations that could be valued at up to $1.5 billion, after receiving unsolicited interest [FT]

Markets

Kioxia’s market value has fallen to 21 trillion yen ($134 billion), from 60 trillion yen ($383 billion) in June, after a global chip sell-off and rising Chinese competition knocked its shares [Nikkei Asia]

Earnings

Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT expects nine-month net profit of 131 billion to 132.5 billion yuan ($19.6 billion to $19.8 billion), reversing a loss a year earlier as the global memory boom lifts prices [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

Indian billionaire family offices are backing homegrown AI startups as the country tries to narrow the gap with the US and China, with at least six local AI companies now valued above $1 billion [Bloomberg]

Malaysia has unveiled six locally developed chips expected to generate 300 million ringgit ($74 million) in annual sales, part of its push beyond semiconductor packaging and testing into chip design [The Edge Malaysia]

Alibaba is testing an AI assistant for Taobao and Tmall merchants as it prepares to embed Qwen across its e-commerce operations next year [SCMP]

DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash-1017, claiming faster task completion, shorter answers and improved benchmark performance [Hugging Face]

Samsung will use TSMC’s 3-nanometre process for the base die in Nvidia’s next-generation custom high-bandwidth memory, ending its practice of making both components in-house [Seoul Economic Daily]

Policy

China has proposed export controls on 23 advanced AI technologies, including model weights, source code, chip designs and computing systems that exceed set performance thresholds [Bloomberg]

Taiwan plans to put advanced semiconductors and AI servers under export controls, bringing it closer to US restrictions on China and making unlicensed shipments a criminal offence [Bloomberg]

India’s CERT-In said AI agents breached live systems and accessed confidential business records during tests, beyond their authorised tasks, though it did not name the providers or affected organisations [Reuters]

Southeast Asia is being pulled between Washington’s Pax Silica supply-chain coalition and Beijing’s AI-cooperation group, with Singapore and the Philippines joining the former while Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Myanmar back the latter [Nikkei Asia]

A Chinese court upheld a prison sentence for the operator of pirate-streaming site Aiyifan, while a US judge awarded iQIYI $1.96 million in damages but declined to transfer the platform’s domains [TorrentFreak]

In other news:

Google has warned that a suspected China-linked group exploited a flaw in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support software, which could expose credentials and give attackers control of affected devices [Reuters]

Japan’s electricity network is increasingly exposed to cyberattacks through its 80 million connected smart meters, as hackers target companies and infrastructure linked to the grid [Nikkei Asia]

Happy Friday, we don’t often dive into crypto topics but this week has seen a major security scare sweep across Asia. Evidence of spyware in Ledger’s hardware devices threatens the safety behind the principle that you can own your assets independently. A key supply chain has been compromised, and we don’t yet know how it happened or the full extent of the impact.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Crypto’s core tenet of self-hosted finance is under pressure

A serious issue undermining the security of self-hosted crypto wallets has emerged in Asia after spyware implants were found inside Nano X hardware wallets from Ledger, one of the market leaders. The wallets themselves were bought in Malaysia, Germany and Singapore (Changi Airport, no less) from Ledger resellers, suggesting that the product has been doctored to enable user wallets to be drained.

If you’re not familiar with crypto wallets, the revolutionary factor is that you can keep your assets yourself, without relying on a third party like an exchange or, in fiat asset terms, banks and other custodians. Software security is sufficient but it is usually advisable to augment that approach with a hardware wallet, like Ledger’s Nano. It acts as a physical key, securely signing transactions so you can access and move assets without exposing your private keys online.

The spyware found on these three hardware keys could grant a third party remote access to any wallets they’re used to secure. But this doesn’t look like a random issue.

Long-time crypto figure Mark Karpelès, who you may remember was previously the founder of the Mt Gox exchange which went bankrupt after a hack more than a decade ago, found the spyware. He noted that the reseller in Southeast Asia, CryptoBilis, was recently acquired by a Chinese national, which raised suspicion of a supply chain attack.

There’s no direct link between the change of ownership and discovery of spyware, and a Europe-based reseller’s product was also affected.

Personally, I owned a couple of Ledger devices. I’ve always purchased them directly from the company, but these incidents raise concern over the safety of all hardware wallets going forward. Self custody is a major feature of cryptocurrency wallets, but the growing sophistication of AI, emergence of quantum computing and the uncertainty of supply chains is pushing the argument that custody of coins with exchanges or even via ETFs may be safer.

For now, Ledger has ceased sales via these partners. This is a story that’s sure to have important updates soon.

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Apple Intelligence finally gets the green light to launch in China

Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China after it received approval to add Alibaba’s Qwen and Tongyi Wanxiang models to Apple devices. The launch is expected for December through the planned iOS 27.3 launch.

It’s been nearly two years since Apple introduced the product to its devices worldwide, bringing its own flavour of personal AI services that include image editing, writing assistance, upgraded Siri and more. But its launch in China has been subject to finding the right partnership deals and then getting the regulatory green light. Apple Intelligence was expected to launch last May, but the Chinese government has been very careful with AI products. Unsurprisingly, an Apple AI service wasn’t likely to be fast-tracked.

Notably, though, Apple Intelligence won’t include Siri and other newer features in China. This will very much be a local flavour, which probably will mean it is watered down and effectively an Alibaba show.

Japan’s SmartNews reportedly plots IPO at reduced valuation

A few years ago, Japan’s SmartNews was heralded as one of the pioneers that might save media. A distribution app that had buy-in from media outlets, the concept was different from needing to fight for attention in today’s algorithmic era.

SmartNews reached a $2 billion valuation in 2021, making it a rare global success story from a Japanese startup. Now, the Tokyo-based company is said to be preparing for an IPO, according to Bloomberg, but the bad news is that its valuation will be significantly lower at around 50 billion yen, or $317 million.

The 14-year-old firm explored a potential sale, but without success, Bloomberg claims. Back in 2023, SmartNews laid off nearly half of its US and China teams as cracks in its model began to emerge.

Deals

DeepSeek is reportedly leading a seed round worth tens of millions of dollars for robotics startup Winverse AI, valuing the former Tencent scientist’s company at about $400 million [Bloomberg]

Indian AI startup Sarvam is said to be in talks to raise $250 million to $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, which would double its value from a deal closed four months ago [Economic Times]

There’s a new fund in town after Singapore’s Antares Ventures secured more than $50 million for its first deep-tech fund, which is targeting $100 million [WSJ]

Thailand-based earned-wage startup Salary Hero raised $7.6 million in a Cento Ventures-led Series A to expand into Malaysia [Fintech News SG]

Indian advanced-materials startup Scimplify raised $25 million from Hitachi Ventures and others to expand US manufacturing for semiconductor, defence, energy and AI-infrastructure customers [Entrackr]

Google.org committed $15 million to The/Nudge to build AI tools for India’s small businesses, covering credit access, markets and compliance [Entrackr]

Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace is seeking $300 million to scale rocket production after its first orbital mission, at valuations of up to $3 billion [Economic Times]

Indian caller-ID startup Equal AI has attracted early investor interest for a growth round at a valuation of up to $1 billion as it pursues a larger share of Truecaller’s market [Bloomberg]

Japan’s Omron plans to buy US computer maker OnLogic for about 100 billion yen ($630.5 million) to combine industrial controls with AI systems for factories [Nikkei Asia]

Markets

Indian manufacturing platform Zetwerk is preparing an IPO of up to $525 million at a 270 billion rupees ($2.8 billion) valuation, with trading expected to begin on 23 October [Bloomberg]

Moonshot AI’s CEO and CTO are in talks to settle a dispute with former venture Recurrent.ai ahead of the Chinese startup’s planned Hong Kong listing [Reuters]

Meanwhile, Bank of America has dropped talks to help arrange Moonshot AI’s planned Hong Kong IPO as US scrutiny complicates Wall Street’s China AI business [Bloomberg]

Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms plans to raise up to $3.2 billion at a valuation of up to $108.3 billion in India’s largest IPO to date [Reuters]

Printed-circuit-board maker Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing is sounding out investors for a Hong Kong listing that could raise $2 billion to $3 billion [Bloomberg]

Asian chipmakers fell sharply as investors questioned the funding required for AI infrastructure, with SK Hynix down more than 10% and Samsung Electronics down 7.1% [CNBC]

AI and Chips

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar warned that companies using low-cost Chinese AI models could face cybersecurity risks [Bloomberg]

TSMC executives met Texas officials and began more serious discussions over a potential US expansion in the first half of 2026 [Culpium]

CXMT says it has made progress on a high-density 4F-square memory-cell design and plans a server-memory product using it by the end of 2026 [Nikkei]

Chinese technology companies reportedly bought more than 1 million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips this year because domestic AI-chip supply still trails demand [FT]

Chinese AI-chip maker Iluvatar CoreX launched a supernode that packs 144 GPUs and 18 CPUs into one cabinet for AI training and inference [SCMP]

Alibaba launched Qwen Glasses N1 from 2,999 yuan ($450), positioning the device as a gateway to its AI assistants and services [Bloomberg]

Anthropic officially opened its Singapore office and agreed to work with the city-state’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information [Anthropic]

Japan will invest up to $21 billion in two New York chip factories operated by GlobalFoundries under a wider US trade deal [Reuters]

ASML expects China to account for about 20% of sales this year after shipments to the market rose 109% quarter on quarter in the third quarter [SCMP]

ByteDance is in advanced talks to buy custom data-centre chips from Taiwan’s MediaTek, giving the chipmaker a second major ASIC customer after Google [Bloomberg]

SK Hynix is seeking Washington’s approval to export US chipmaking equipment to China as part of talks linked to a planned US factory [Reuters]

TSMC is open to collaborating with Elon Musk’s Terafab project, but says it must retain control of any fabrication plants [Bloomberg]

Elsewhere, TSMC will build another 3-nanometre factory in Tainan, with production scheduled to begin in the first half of 2028 [The Information]

Japanese startup Solafune and Tohoku University plan to launch an AI-powered Earth-observation satellite by the end of the decade, processing imagery in orbit to cut costs [Nikkei Asia]

Data centres

Australia’s Firmus, the data centre firm backed by Nvidia, shelved its $5 billion Australian IPO after investor concern over AI valuations and the cost of building infrastructure weakened demand [Reuters]

Relatedly, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk delayed its planned Singapore REIT IPO, which was expected to raise $1.5 billion, until 2027 as higher rates and volatile markets weaken demand for AI-infrastructure listings [Bloomberg]

But there’s still plenty of money flying around: DayOne filed to go public in the US, but before that happens it secured 15 billion ringgit ($3.67 billion) from seven banks, including DBS and Standard Chartered, to expand its Johor hyperscale data centres [Reuters]

Bridge Data Centres is seeking to more than double its Malaysian loan to $6.6 billion, while a separate $6 billion Thailand data-centre loan has stalled after construction suspensions over energy use [Bloomberg]

Bitdeer signed an eight-year agreement for a 60 MW Cyberjaya data centre, taking its secured AI-cloud capacity to 333.5 MW ahead of its 2028 target [TechNode]

Singapore’s Princeton Digital Group is seeking a syndicated loan of up to $1.2 billion for Malaysian data-centre expansion [Bloomberg]

Tencent raised $5.7 billion in a debt sale, with proceeds largely earmarked for AI capital expenditure and chip purchases [Reuters]

China Mobile tripled capacity at its Hohhot data centre in Inner Mongolia to 20,100 petaflops [SCMP]

NTT Data is in final talks with Anthropic on a 500 MW Osaka data centre that could cost 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion) and begin partial operations in 2028 [Nikkei Asia]

Crypto

Taiwan blocked domestic access to Coinbase and Kalshi over suspected election betting ahead of local polls [Bloomberg]

Policy

US regulators are questioning banks about their use of advanced AI, including Chinese models and autonomous systems, amid cybersecurity and financial-stability concerns [Reuters]

India delayed a planned 0.4% charge on eligible UPI merchant transactions above ₹2,000 ($22) until after Diwali following retailer pushback [TechCrunch]

AI is cutting the cost of scam operations tied to Chinese criminal networks, allowing them to scale beyond Asia’s fortified compounds [Bloomberg]

India’s food regulator plans stricter rules for Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Amazon Now, including manufacturing dates, expiry dates and batch numbers on listings [Bloomberg]

North Korean hacking group Kimsuky targeted Ukrainian diplomats, security officials and policy experts with fake conference invitations and malicious documents [The Record]

US authorities raided more than 40 Texas homes over remote IT-worker schemes alleged to have funnelled millions of dollars to North Korea [The Record]

The IMF and World Bank launched the Bangkok Blueprint, a 12-point plan developed with the Bank of Thailand to coordinate responses to online financial fraud [Bloomberg]

Malaysia plans to use Chinese satellite technology to improve flood forecasts and warnings during the northeast monsoon [Bloomberg]

The EU is negotiating with China to lift sanctions on a Chinese company in return for relief for a German supplier to ASML [Bloomberg]

Microsoft won a US court order to seize domains used by three Chinese-linked phishing platforms that have sent more than 750 million messages since January [The Record]

In other news:

Grab is adding microdramas and mobile games to its app as it looks for advertising and cross-selling opportunities beyond rides and deliveries [Bloomberg]

A new report forecasts Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market will nearly double from $197 billion in 2025 to $400 billion by 2031, while checkout preferences remain sharply fragmented by country as cash on delivery declines [Fintech News Singapore] [Disclosure: Xendit is an Ellerton & Co. client]

Singapore’s online-grocery market is projected to grow from $1.48 billion in 2025 to $3.24 billion by 2034 as Grab and Foodpanda expand beyond restaurant delivery [Nikkei Asia]

Singapore has attracted $1.3 billion in climate-tech funding since 2020, around 80% of Southeast Asia’s total, as green-energy policy and patient capital draw startups [Nikkei Asia]

China’s smartphone shipments fell 15.4% year on year to 57.9 million units in the third quarter, while Huawei was the only major vendor to post double-digit growth [Reuters]

Vietnamese ride-hailing company Green SM launched its all-electric taxi service in Los Angeles, its ninth international market [LA Times]

Indian venture firms including Peak XV, Elevation, Z47 and Blume are expanding in Silicon Valley to follow founders moving to the US and get closer to the AI startup boom [Newcomer]

Firstly, apologies to our subscribers. The last week in Singapore was intense and we missed two issues of ATR. But we’re back with major news for DeepSeek, Manus, Moonshot AI, Revolut and more. I’ll recap the Token2049 event later this week when there’s a chance. Thanks for your patience, time and generosity sharing our work with your friends.

Three Chinese AI musketeers in big money deals

It’s been quite a week for China’s private AI companies after Manus, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek all made progress on major, strategic funding rounds that will have a big say on their futures.

Manus, well its parent company Butterfly Effect, raised more than $500 million to cement its journey as an independent business less than a year after it was acquired by Meta for over $2 billion. The deal was led by Boyu Capital, the fund co-founded by a grandson of former Chinese premier Joang Zemin, and IDG Capital with existing investors Tencent, ​HSG and ZhenFund taking part.

There’s no word on valuation. Butterfly Effect has been linked with an IPO, with the idea being investors could back a sure thing for a public listing at a late stage. There’s no word on that, either, but Reuters said the company “won’t begin ​the process for a Hong Kong initial ​public offering ⁠until at least 2027.”

A listing is coming sooner for Moonshot AI, which Bloomberg reports closed a final private company funding round that values the business at $50 billion. Unlike Manus, we know the valuation for this deal but we don’t know exactly how much Moonshot raised.

It is, however, in the market for a $5 billion fundraise from its Hong Kong IPO, Bloomberg says, which could come in the first quarter of next year with impressive financial headwinds.

Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue, a gauge of future sales, is expected to rise to $2 billion by December from the current $1 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. The company achieved $300 million of ARR in June, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

Finally, because news comes in threes, DeepSeek is said to be close to raising ‘at least’ $12 billion in a new round that could reach $15 billion, according to another Bloomberg report. The deal is said to be led by Tencent and battery firm CATL and it would value DeepSeek at $75 billion, the report added.

Interestingly, the deal would give Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s founder, a net worth of $36 billion, more than Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other US AI executives. That’s all paper money until an exit, of course, but it does show the buzz behind DeepSeek, how the firm has managed investors and the fact that Liang has also invested his own capital, too. Definitely not an ordinary company or regular investment deal.

Without wishing to repeat myself, these deals feel incredibly risky without existing public companies to model valuations on. Yes, we have results from Z.ai and MiniMax in Hong Kong but OpenAI and Anthropic’s listing will be illustrative in knowing exactly how the markets will value DeepSeek, Moonshot and others.

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DayOne files for IPO at a reported $20 billion valuation

We’ve written about DayOne and its billions of dollars in funding, and now the growing data centre operator has filed for a US IPO.

DayOne, the international business of China’s GDS, has raised nearly $6.5 billion. We don’t officially know how much the company plans to raise nor at what valuation, but WSJ reports it could target a $5 billion float at a potential $20 billion valuation. Just before that happens, though, it is closing a $500 million bond raise.

The company is focused on Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea and it saw revenue grow 3X to reach $512 million in the first half of this year with a net loss of $81.9 million, which jumped significantly from $13.5 million.

This is a huge listing that, like these AI IPOs, could help define revenue-valuation comparatives for a host of future listings, market sentiment and more.

Deals

Qualcomm agreed to license patents underpinning Huawei’s novel LogicFolding chipmaking technique [Yahoo Finance]

Granite Asia and Google’s AI Futures Fund will co-invest up to $2 million in selected Asian AI startups [Granite Asia]

Prosus is in talks to invest in Indian fintech startups Kiwi and Oolka as it increases its bets on the country’s financial services sector [Economic Times]

Garuda Aerospace raised about $10 million in a pre-IPO round that valued the Indian drone maker at $320 million [Economic Times]

Indian fintech Navi is in talks to raise about $40 million from Elevation at a valuation of $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion [Moneycontrol]

Former ByteDance intern and current PhD student Tian Keyu is said to have raised nearly $30 million for a stealth startup developing AI world models [Bloomberg]

StarHub will acquire MyRepublic’s mobile business to expand its multi-brand mobile strategy [The Straits Times]

Universal Quantum raised $100 million to expand research hubs in Germany and Singapore [WSJ]

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is seeking up to $100 billion from Gulf investors to finance his expanding AI investments [FT]

Indian edtech startup byteXL raised $9 million to expand its engineering-college network and AI learning tools [Entrackr]

Singapore-based AI company OneByZero has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures, its first external funding round. The company, which deploys AI across financial services, telecommunications and retail, has more than doubled its revenue annually over the past three years [OneByZero]

Markets

Transsion, now Africa’s dominant smartphone maker, is reportedly seeking to raise up to HK$3.36 billion ($428 million) through a Hong Kong share sale [Bloomberg]

Malaysian chipmaker SQ Advanced Interconnect is said to be considering a first-quarter 2027 IPO that could raise about 300 million ringgit ($73 million) [Bloomberg]

Tencent is reportedly considering an offshore bond sale of up to $5 billion as tech companies raise debt to fund AI investment [Bloomberg]

Dramatic: Firmus Technologies scrapped its planned $44 billion Australian IPO and will seek funding from Nvidia and existing investors instead [AFR]

Uzbek fintech Uzum is considering its first eurobond sale as early as the end of 2026 [Bloomberg]

Shanghai Biren Technology shares fell more than 12% in Hong Kong after the AI chipmaker announced plans to raise HK$4 billion ($510 million) through a share placement [SCMP]

Earnings

Samsung Electronics reported record third-quarter operating profit as demand for AI memory surged [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

AirTrunk plans to invest up to $30 billion in Japan over five years and more than double its committed capacity to over 1GW [Nikkei Asia]

Reflection AI launched Beam, an open-weight model it says matches leading Chinese models on reasoning benchmarks at a lower cost [Reflection AI]

South Korea will launch a state-backed frontier AI project next year, backed by 4.7 trillion won ($3.48 billion) in equity investment [The Korea Times]

Anthropic began processing Claude requests locally in India through AWS Bedrock, giving Indian organisations local inference and compliance controls [Economic Times]

ElevenLabs plans to support all 22 officially recognised Indian languages, up from 14 on its latest text-to-speech model [Economic Times]

Samsung Electro-Mechanics will invest $5.07 billion in Vietnam and South Korea through 2028 to expand chip-substrate production [Nikkei Asia]

Zero Gravity will invest S$20 million ($15.6 million) in Singapore over five years and establish its global headquarters there [CNA]

Huawei is using homegrown chips to rebuild overseas smartphone sales and plans to expand HarmonyOS abroad within one to three years [CNBC]

Line Thailand plans to add more AI features as it tries to become an everyday AI platform for its 56 million local users [Nikkei Asia]

Japanese contract chipmaker Rapidus will partner with 17 semiconductor design companies, including the Toshiba group, to help clients develop their own branded advanced chips. Rapidus expects the partnerships to generate more orders as it expands its role across the semiconductor supply chain, from chip design through production [Nikkei Asia]

Malaysian chip designer SkyeChip is targeting Japanese companies developing custom AI processors as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its semiconductor industry. The company, which joined Rapidus’ Collaborative Open Rapid Ecosystem as one of 17 inaugural design solution associates, expects Japan’s push to mass-produce 2-nanometer chips from 2027 to create opportunities for smaller chip designers [Nikkei Asia]

Chinese chipmakers have accumulated an estimated 343 immersion DUV lithography tools since 2012, many capable of supporting 7nm-class chip production, . The equipment could give Chinese fabs significant capacity to produce advanced processors despite restrictions on access to ASML’s more advanced EUV systems [Tom’s Hardware]

AM Intelligence has placed binding orders for about 20,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, taking its total committed capacity to 29,000 GPUs and nearly 100 MW across India and Malaysia. The additional 70 MW is due to be deployed from the second quarter of 2027, following AMI’s initial 9,000-GPU commitment for an AI factory in Hyderabad [Moneycontrol]

US data centre operators continue to rely on Chinese suppliers for batteries, cooling systems and optical equipment despite national security concerns. Chinese manufacturers offer shorter lead times than US rivals, leaving companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle dependent on them [The Information]

Taiwanese semiconductor and electronics companies are accelerating overseas investment to expand supply chains for surging AI infrastructure demand, with major commitments in the US and Southeast Asia. TSMC has announced $265 billion in US investments, while companies including Quanta, Wistron, Inventec, Asia Vital Components and Taiwan Union Technology are expanding server, circuit board and cooling component production across the two regions [Nikkei Asia]

Elon Musk said his companies will build and operate the Texas-based Terafab chipmaking project independently, ruling out a role for TSMC in running the facility. TSMC may only lease part of the planned site, Musk said, as Terafab targets chip production for Tesla and SpaceX [Bloomberg]

A union representing Micron Technology workers in Taiwan has authorised a strike after 1,994 members, or 99% of those who voted, backed industrial action over the company’s bonus scheme. The timing remains undecided, but a strike could disrupt Micron’s Taiwan operations, a key production hub for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers [Reuters]

Canon plans to bring its semiconductor technology and service centres to India after discussions with companies involved in the country’s chip manufacturing projects. The Japanese imaging and optical major aims to support India’s efforts to build domestic semiconductor fabrication capabilities with its lithography systems [BusinessLine]

Japanese publishers are questioning Anthropic’s bulk purchases of books after Nippan Group Holdings sold large quantities of titles from publishers in the Japan Book Publishers Association to the AI company between December 2024 and December 2025. Nippan said it was unaware the books would be used to train AI models, reigniting concerns over authors’ rights [Nikkei Asia]

Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai said Europe should use open-source AI and build its own computing infrastructure to reduce reliance on US and Chinese technology. He urged European countries to develop local capacity to train and run AI models, including inference [Bloomberg]

SoftBank Group, Grab and Malaysian energy group Petros will explore developing an AI and digital infrastructure platform in Sarawak, Malaysia’s largest state. The partnership will cover AI computing and services, advanced technologies, robotics and workforce development [Nikkei Asia]

Crypto

Hyperliquid is drawing scrutiny in Singapore over its leveraged perpetual futures contracts ahead of founder Jeff Yan’s Token2049 appearance [FT]

Singapore-based Nium is partnering with RedotPay to expand fiat off-ramp access for the stablecoin platform’s more than 9 million users. RedotPay will connect to Nium’s cross-border payments network to support digital asset-to-fiat conversions across more markets [PRNewswire]

Policy

Hong Kong’s de facto central bank questioned HSBC over choosing Singapore, rather than Hong Kong, for its global AI centre of excellence [FT]

Four US states sued TP-Link, alleging the networking company misled consumers about router security and its China ties [Tom’s Hardware]

The US Treasury fined Plug and Play parent Amidi $200,000 for failing to report an investment in a Chinese robotics AI startup [SCMP]

The US is offering a $10 million reward for information on Zhang Yu, a Chinese national accused of helping lead the Hafnium hacking campaign [The Record]

India rejected Elon Musk’s claim that Starlink is being unfairly blocked as SpaceX seeks commercial approval after years of regulatory work [TechCrunch]

Japan recorded 13 corporate data breaches in a single day in September, prompting the government to call for security checks [Bloomberg]

The US Federal Communications Commission plans to vote Oct. 29 on rules barring Chinese testing labs and certification bodies from approving smartphones, cameras, computers and other electronics for the US market. The FCC said 82% of electronics were tested in China in 2025, with the new restrictions set to take effect in December 2028 [Reuters]

TikTok allegedly gave thousands of users, including children and teens, non-functional versions of safety features such as Algo Refresh, . Users believed the features were active, but their recommendation feeds did not change as they would with working versions [Reuters]

In other news:

Revolut will invest nearly $350 million in Singapore over five years and more than double its local workforce [The Straits Times]

Former Flipkart executives asked Walmart to cash out their vested stock options after another delay to an India listing [Economic Times]

Uber and Pony.ai plan to launch a robotaxi service in London, beginning tests of Pony.ai’s Gen-7 vehicles in the coming weeks [TechCrunch]

Shenzhen opened its streets to nighttime driverless deliveries, allowing companies to test round-the-clock logistics [Bloomberg]

Meta banned ByteDance ads and paid marketing messages across its platforms in seven countries, including Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam [Bloomberg]

Streaming platforms are projected to account for 50% of Asia’s $5.7 billion sports-rights fees this year, up from 36% in 2021 [Bloomberg]

Insta360, which went public in June, is targeting US market share as national-security restrictions block new DJI products from FCC approval [Rest of World]

Smartphone prices have risen globally as AI data-center demand drives a memory-chip shortage, with existing models about 15% more expensive this year and new models up 25% from last year. Chinese manufacturers, which account for about 60% of global shipments, have sharply reduced entry-level projects and shifted toward premium devices, with prices rising 21% in India, 19% across Asia-Pacific and 18% in the Middle East and Africa [Rest of World]

Japanese media group Nikkei disclosed two cyber incidents, including an attack in which a Microsoft 365 account was compromised and used to send about 9,000 phishing emails to employees, external contacts and journalistic sources [The Record]

At least six tenants in a Beijing office building reportedly sell Chinese customers access to Anthropic’s Claude and other US AI models, despite Anthropic not offering its services in China. Demand for Claude access remains high as Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of extracting its models’ capabilities using fake or stolen accounts, payment cards and identities [The Information]

Grab and GoTo, which control about 85% of Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing market, face growing pressure to improve driver earnings after months of protests and regulatory scrutiny across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. GoTo shares have fallen more than 90% from their 2022 peak to its current level, while Grab has lost 50% in the past year as higher fuel costs threaten already tight margins [FT]

China’s crackdown on offshore assets and trusts is raising concerns over Singapore’s ability to attract Chinese wealth, after the city-state also tightened scrutiny of wealth sources following a S$3 billion money-laundering scandal. Singapore has seen growing competition from Hong Kong, which recorded more new single-family offices than Singapore from 2023 to 2025, while stricter bank checks have lengthened account-opening times for some Chinese clients [Nikkei Asia]

Malaysia is reclaiming 2,300 acres off Penang to build Silicon Island, giving the state’s semiconductor industry room to expand as land runs short around its Bayan Lepas manufacturing hub. The project aims to move Malaysia beyond chip assembly and testing into higher-value activities such as chip design and advanced packaging, with developers projecting 220,000 jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic value by 2050 [Bloomberg]

CrowdStrike said a 26-year-old likely based in China’s Guangdong province was behind recent cyberattacks on South Korean banks, using a Chinese AI agent and Anthropic’s Claude Code [CrowdStrike]

Researchers found malware preinstalled on thousands of low-cost Android phones that can generate fraudulent ad revenue and potentially add devices to botnets. Bitdefender dubbed the campaign “Midnight Mimosa” and said it affects multiple brands using MediaTek chips, while some affected firmware carried certificates bearing the name of Chinese hardware maker Shenzhen Zediel [The Record]

Current and former employees say TikTok US still coordinates closely with the global TikTok org, and US staff continue to use ByteDance’s internal chat app Lark (Sylvia Varnham O’Regan/Politico) [Politico]

The Trump administration has temporarily barred Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, alleging abuse of immigration programmes at the expense of American workers [FT]

Synopsys plans to explore partnerships with Chinese AI labs to develop tools that accelerate chip design, despite tighter US export controls. The move follows a multi-year deal with OpenAI to develop GPT-Synopsys, an AI model designed to automate chip design [Nikkei Asia]

China is rapidly building data centres across its energy-rich interior, using cheap land and abundant electricity to narrow the gap with the US in AI computing. The country has 24GW of operational data centre capacity, with another 50GW under construction or announced, while Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia has 89 data centres built or planned and 15GW of committed capacity, making it one of Asia’s fastest-growing AI infrastructure hubs [FT]

The Chinese developer of ARTEX has made the AI agent closed-source after cybersecurity firms linked it to a cyberattack campaign against South Korean banks. The developer, known as Autumn-27 on GitHub, said no further public versions or maintenance updates would be released [Reuters]

OpenAI’s senior Asia-Pacific public policy executive, Sanghyun Lee, is leaving after six months in the role as the ChatGPT maker faces regulatory scrutiny across the region. Based in Singapore, Lee joined in April after six years at Google; the reason for his departure was not immediately clear [Bloomberg]

China’s Star 50 Index fell as much as 4.6% on Friday, extending its two-day loss to more than 9%, while the ChiNext gauge dropped up to 3.4%. Chip and optical component stocks have retreated from record highs as investors reassess AI valuations amid rising borrowing costs, debt concerns and fears of potential US restrictions on Chinese optical module imports [Bloomberg]

Shenzhen-based Transsion has become Africa’s dominant phone maker by tapping into informal trade networks for low-cost Chinese handsets, accounting for nearly half of all phones sold on the continent each year [Sixth Tone]

Laptop makers are reconsidering production shifts out of China as soaring component costs squeeze margins, . The share of global notebook production outside mainland China is forecast to fall to 21% this year from 24% in 2025 and below 20% in 2027, reversing efforts to diversify supply chains amid tariff and geopolitical risks [SCMP]

Singapore-based DayOne Data Centers is in preliminary talks with banks for a potential $500 million bond sale as it pursues a US IPO that could raise about $5 billion. The debt discussions continue despite project partner Firmus, backed by Nvidia, dropping its Australian IPO plans this week [Bloomberg]

Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a former contractor charged alongside Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, pleaded guilty to conspiring to evade US export controls. Prosecutors allege the scheme routed Nvidia-powered servers through a Southeast Asian company before diverting them to Chinese customers [Bloomberg]

Former Flipkart executives are mobilising 20,000 to 30,000 ex-employees to demand inclusion in Walmart’s planned $2 billion employee stock option buyback. A petition launched on October 10 covers former staff from Flipkart, Myntra, Cleartrip, Shopsy, Super Money and ANS Commerce [Economic Times]

Taiwan’s ProLogium and other solid-state battery makers are targeting AI and industrial robotics as sluggish EV demand and high costs delay wider automotive adoption. The technology offers higher energy density and improved fire resistance compared with conventional lithium-ion batteries [Nikkei Asia]

Japan’s Sumitomo Bakelite will expand production of advanced chip packaging materials in Suzhou, China, and Singapore, doubling capacity for mould underfill materials and tripling output of compression-moulding granules [SCMP]

Chinese EV maker Xpeng can adapt its driver-assistance system to different European countries in about two weeks, using as little as one ten-thousandth of the data required to train its underlying AI models. The approach allows the company to tailor its software to local road conditions without rebuilding it from scratch [Bloomberg]

Supabase might just be the best example of a new tech startup in Singapore. It has built a fast-growing and global business that’s been backed with over $1 billion from investors across the world. And it’s building core tools for the agentic era. Today, we look at its newest round, an acquisition and its future goals.

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The tech startup blueprint Singapore wants to see more of

Supabase, the Singapore-based database platform that helps developers build apps and software, closed a $150 million funding round, just four months after it announced a $500 million Series F round.

The round is led by GIC, the Singapore sovereign fund, and it includes Google’s CapitalG fund for the first time. That’s notable as one of the main competitors of Supabase’s developer stack is Google-owned Firebase. Still, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone said the fund’s “connections to the broader Alphabet ecosystem will be invaluable as we build for our next level of growth.”

You don’t typically see a smaller round like this follow a huge raise like Supabase’s Series F, but in this case the startup’s recent growth spurt is such that it appears to need the funds to support continuing to accelerate its trajectory.

“Supabase is now adding more than 1M users and 4M databases per month with 70% of new databases created by agents or AI-driven tools. The growth follows a 600% year-over-year increase in databases reported in June, when agents were already deploying the majority of new databases on the platform,” the company wrote.

Supabase has raised over $1 billion in total from investors that include Accel, Peak XV, Craft, Coatue, Y Combinator, Stripe, Salesforce Ventures and Figma.

It’s worth recalling what Supabase does. It provides a set of backend tools to enable developers to quickly build and develop apps, websites and other software using a central resource to manage files, authentication, databases and more. In the agentic era which allows software to be created in minutes or hours not days, that’s a particularly key tech stack as Supabase’s numbers seem to show.

That explains why, alongside the funding round, it announced that it acquired a startup called Turso, which allows databases to be provisioned on demand. That makes perfect sense for Supabase since vibe- and agentic-coding is sending its numbers skyrocketing, it needs the tools to support faster creation of databases and the plumbing beyond apps, websites and more.

Whether you create a web app for friends, a private CRM tool for your company or a new product for an existing customer base, Supabase wants to make its tools the go to for Claude, ChatGPT or bots like Muse, Grok Bot or Dots.

Supabase is the closest example to a modern Singapore tech success story. Its founders aren’t Singaporean, but they met in the country during a cohort for Entrepreneur First.

They didn’t start their business in EF, the accelerator programme that left Singapore in 2023, but they’ve grown a multi-billion dollar startup from the country without being limited to serving Southeast Asia or raising only from VCs in the region. Speaking of fundraising, you’d imagine that association has helped it win the continued support of GIC, which has been a key backer.

Now, Supabase has a real chance to put Singapore on the map for growing a global business in the age of AI.

India takes down Bitchat, Jack Dorsey’s app used by political protesters

Chat apps are a tough market to enter. There are hundreds of competitors and you need critical mass for a user to find value and return. Bitchat, the messaging app co-developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has managed to beat the odds since its launch a year ago. Proof of that comes after it was removed from app stores in India.

Unlike other messaging apps, Bitchat uses Bluetooth to enable chat between devices meaning it can function without cellular signal or WiFi. That led to its popularity surging in India after it was used by protesters over the summer. Its features enabled the protesters, from a Gen Z-led group, to continue to communicate despite authorities cutting access to mobile networks in the area.

The Indian government ordered its removal from Apple and Google’s app stores due to illegal content, but it’s fair to assume that’s linked to the protests. That’s proof Bitchat works exactly as intended, though Dorsey would doubtless prefer it remains fully accessible in India. Android devices will allow it to be sideloaded, but no longer being available in app stores will impact distribution.

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AI data centre boom brings new demand for old tech

The insatiable demand for AI is making those who provide the key pieces for data centres think outside the box.

Toshiba, for example, has pledged to spend nearly $400 million by the end of next year to double the capacity of its hard drive production in the Philippines. Hard disk drives have long been obsolete for consumers with solid state drives replacing them. But they remain a cheap way of providing storage, which makes them useful in the AI data centre rush.

Another Japanese company is repurposing a technology that never made it off the ground.

Fuji Electric is dusting off refrigeration technology that it built for vending machines after Fukushima. The innovation uses waste heat to slash cooling power in machines by up to 85%. It was deemed too pricey to ever be seriously rolled out, but the firm believes it can have value at data centre scale.

Deals

AI chip startup Agrani Labs is reportedly in talks to raise ₹8-8.5 billion ($90-96 million) from Samsung, 360 One Asset Management and Peak XV Partners at a ₹24-25 billion ($270-281 million) valuation [Economic Times]

SoftBank completed its $4 billion acquisition of DigitalBridge, creating a vehicle to raise outside capital for its AI infrastructure push in data centres, power and related assets [FT]

Markets

Goldman Sachs bought about $220 million of Shein shares, or 13% of its initial float, after the online fashion retailer’s weak Hong Kong debut [FT]

Pony AI and WeRide are expected to remain loss-making through 2028 as their robotaxi fleets lag Waymo on utilisation [Bloomberg]

AI and Chips

TSMC is reportedly exploring a partnership with Elon Musk’s Terafab to operate planned semiconductor factories in Texas, with structures ranging from ownership to purchase commitments under discussion [Culpium]

Chinese-owned semiconductor fabs had acquired an estimated 343 immersion DUV lithography systems by early 2026 [SCMP]

Japanese local governments are stepping up outreach to Taiwan for AI and semiconductor investment as they try to capture more of the island’s industrial growth [Nikkei Asia]

US chip-IP provider MIPS is working with Chinese companies to standardise open-source RISC-V architecture across AI, microcontrollers and data-centre servers despite worsening US-China tensions [SCMP]

Policy

Pakistan will tax content creators on actual earnings or 195 rupees ($0.70) per 1,000 views, whichever is higher, a move that critics say could drive creators and payments offshore [Nikkei Asia]

Amazon and Flipkart are reviewing Indian security-camera listings after Reuters found hundreds of unlicensed products on sale despite testing rules introduced over espionage concerns [Reuters]

UK universities are reviewing links with China General Technology Research Institute after MI5 warned them to cut ties over its alleged intelligence connections [FT]

Anthropic appears to have tightened geographic restrictions on Claude in Hong Kong, with users reporting account suspensions after using VPNs to access the service [SCMP]

Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung is set to visit Arizona to meet officials and semiconductor companies as Taipei deepens economic ties with the US [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Singapore’s Temasek will open its first Gulf offices in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh next year, using them to support portfolio companies expanding in the Middle East [Semafor]

Hyundai is planning scores of new human-driven cars as Tesla shifts further away from the steering wheel in its push for robotaxis [WSJ]

Singapore does plenty of things other governments wouldn’t and that now includes dating apps after it launched a service to help matchmaking, initially among government workers. A declining birth rate and ageing population mean this isn’t a stunt, although it’s not likely to replace Hinge, Bumble and others just yet.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

State-based matchmaking, what can go wrong?

Dating apps have changed the landscape of matchmaking, but what happens when a national government creates one.

That’s right, Singapore this week introduced FirstDate, an app that matches singles aged between 21 and 35 using an algorithm based on a Nobel Prize-winning formula. The service has been initially rolled out in a pilot for government workers.

It’s no secret that Singapore is keen for its citizens to marry and have children. It has a population of just over 6 million and a declining birth rate, which fell to a record low of 0.87 in 2025, down from 1.24 a decade prior. That’s coupled with an aging population, like many other countries in Asia and beyond.

Last month, the government introduced new economic incentives of up to SG$70,000 (US$55,000) to encourage couples to have children. Now, it is going a step further with its own take on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, etc.

Singapore Samizdat ran through the pilot programme so we don’t have to. Interestingly, it starts with a list of 33 questions which include tick box answers that would make it easy to help match, and open ended ones that would presumably be trickier to link.

Lots of the focus is around the algorithm, but Singapore Samizdat points out it hasn’t been used for dating before, but instead matching where the level of satisfaction is very different:

Problem 1: The algorithm was intended as a solution to a matching problem where there are two groups of people that need to be paired with the other, such that no two people would both prefer each other over the partners they are assigned.

This is why the algorithm has been so useful in contexts like matching medical school residents to hospitals, school choice systems, or matching US army recruits to their units. These are matches that participants have committed to, even if the outcome is not their ideal or top choice.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work, but it does mean that harping on about the prize-winning smarts isn’t the flex it might seem.

Still, it’s another example of Singapore being adventurous and doing things you’d never seen in other parts of the world. It doesn’t all work, of course, but there’s plenty to learn. Personally, I’d want to keep the government out of my dating life, but your own mileage may vary.

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Rethinking coffee and customer service

On Thursday’s episode of The Offline Network Southeast Asia we mixed coffee and AI.

Jake Berber, co-founder of Prefer, told us how and why he’s building an alternative to traditional coffee that tastes just as good and costs less. Jingjing Zhong walked us through how her startup Superbench uses AI to help companies convert leads into sales, and how she almost became an agentic wedding planner.

Catch highlights on our LinkedIn page, X account and YouTube channel.

Tencent reported agreed $7 billion data centre deal with Oracle in Southeast Asia

Tencent is the latest to invest big in data centres in Southeast Asia after it reportedly agreed a five-year lease deal with Oracle that’ll be worth $7 billion.

The agreement isn’t official yet, but the Financial Times reports that the Chinese firm will gain access to 100,000 AI chips through Oracle-operated data centers in the region. The deal would be Tencent’s largest ever overseas cloud agreement.

It once again highlights how Chinese firms look to Southeast Asia to bypass issues with US technology, and Nvidia chips in particular. TikTok pledged to spend $25 billion on Thailand-based data centres earlier this year, and a host of companies are striking deals across Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand and other countries.

It’s worth noting that Oracle is one of the consortium members that acquired the TikTok US business this year.

Apple Pay bets big on India despite quiet start

Apple Pay quietly launched in India with one bank, as we noted on Wednesday. Despite the low key entrance, the US firm has a lot planned, according to a rare interview with a senior exec.

Jennifer Bailey, who heads up Apple Pay, told Moneycontrol her team is working to expand adoption by rolling out with more banks in the country. Her bet is that card use in India will continue to rise while NFC technology becomes increasingly common, too.

“The Axis Bank partnership means the initial addressable pool is a small slice of India’s Apple users. Still, this was a long-awaited feature, and the timing is right. Credit card usage and NFC adoption are growing at double-digit rates, and the credit card base has nearly doubled since COVID to more than 120 million,” was the neat summary from Counterpoint’s Tarun Pathak.

We wrote before that India will be a tough market for Apple, despite it being its third-largest market based on devices. The India launch is Apple’s first big push on payments in Asia for some time, as we noted in August with this chart.

Deals

Vertex Ventures is in talks to lead a $20 million to $30 million round in Hyderabad and Austin-based agentic AI startup RapidCanvas at a $120 million valuation, and is separately considering a $15 million to $20 million investment in Bengaluru spoken-English learning app Supernova at a $100 million valuation [Economic Times]

Vertex completed an investment in Tokyo-based digital trading cards company Heartbeats, its latest bet on Japanese startups with ambitions to build global unicorns [WSJ]

Singapore’s PSA International and VC firm Granite Asia have launched a $50 million fund to back startups developing AI, robotics and automation for ports, logistics and global supply chains [TechNode]

Markets

South Korea’s Kospi fell 18.8% in the third quarter after a July sell-off in memory chip stocks, though it remains up 60% for the year [FT]

Flipkart’s delayed IPO is said to be eroding staff confidence in the value of their equity, with at least 10 VP and SVP-level executives leaving in recent months as Indian rivals Snapdeal, Meesho and Groww move towards their own public listings [Moneycontrol]

Shanghai AI cloud infrastructure provider Infinigence AI, backed by Tencent, Baidu and Z.ai, is targeting a Hong Kong IPO as early as the first half of 2027 after raising 4.3 billion yuan ($641 million) and reaching a 14.3 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) valuation [Bloomberg]

Australian data centre operator Firmus is seeking an A$43.7 billion ($30.3 billion) valuation in its IPO, which is set to raise at least $5 billion, potentially making it one of Australia’s largest-ever public offerings [AFR]

AI and Chips

Anthropic says Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 can autonomously build sophisticated cyber exploits, putting its capability close to Claude Mythos Preview in simulated tests [Anthropic]

AI agents from Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot showed deceptive behaviour in tests, including overstating their capabilities, bypassing restrictions and concealing failures [Reuters]

OpenAI says it disrupted a campaign that tried to extract protected reasoning from its models, with the activity first detected in early July [OpenAI]

US-based PaleBlueDot AI is seeking $600 million in private credit to buy chips for a South Korean site that would serve Chinese social platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote [Bloomberg]

DeepSeek is said to be working with Huawei on programming tools for its Ascend chips, including an open-source version of its TileLang language that reduces developers’ reliance on Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem [Reuters]

India is reworking its IndiaAI Mission as GPU shortages and rising memory prices constrain its compute plans, despite access to about 30,000 of the 45,000 GPUs it initially targeted [Economic Times]

German chipmaker Infineon has opened a $1.4 billion plant near Bangkok, its first in Thailand, as the country pushes to become a regional semiconductor hub for power modules and chip assembly, packaging and testing [Nikkei Asia]

Japan is targeting $140 billion in data centre investment to expand its AI infrastructure, including a planned $15 billion, 400MW project involving Dell, Jera and Apollo near Tokyo [FT]

TSMC is considering a new Texas campus with multiple fabs that could add tens of billions of dollars to its US investment as demand for AI chips continues to grow [Bloomberg]

Micron has sued Chinese memory maker YMTC, accusing the sanctioned company of poaching its engineers and using allegedly stolen NAND technology to develop products and pursue patent infringement claims [Tom’s Hardware]

Huawei plans to raise smartphone prices after memory costs added about $200 to the average device, squeezing its lower-end models first while strengthening its premium segment [Bloomberg]

Crypto

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao is living a gilded life in the UAE after serving a US prison sentence and receiving a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, according to a New York Times profile [The New York Times]

Meanwhile, EU officials are questioning Binance over its use of a legal exemption to continue serving customers in the bloc despite failing to secure a licence and being ordered to wind down its business [FT]

Policy

Indonesia’s West Java governor ordered Singapore-based BDx Data Centers to halt construction of its 640MW AI data centre in Jatiluhur over missing permits [Reuters] [Disclosure: BDx Data Centers is an Ellerton & Co. client]

Singapore retailer Bee Cheng Hiang exposed more than 95,000 customer email addresses after an employee used an AI tool to generate faulty marketing code, in what the country’s data protection authority said was Singapore’s first reported AI-related data breach [The Straits Times]

Britain’s MI5 has warned universities to cut ties with China General Technology Research Institute, which it says secretly channelled funding from China’s Ministry of State Security to more than 100 UK-linked academics working on AI, cybersecurity and covert communications [FT]

Chinese hackers impersonated US AI experts, including a former government official, to steal credentials from people at think tanks, universities and other organisations in a campaign consistent with Chinese intelligence priorities, Proofpoint said [Reuters]

A Chinese state-owned financing company has disclosed it funded the purchase of restricted Nvidia chips, including servers equipped with the B300, suggesting state-backed financing channels for trade that Washington says could advance China’s AI capabilities [Bloomberg]

US prosecutors arrested a California man on charges of smuggling computer servers containing $300 million worth of restricted Nvidia AI chips to Chinese buyers from 2023 to 2024 without required US export licences [Bloomberg]

Nvidia’s AI chips continue to reach China despite US export controls, prompting officials to question whether the company missed warning signs in its supply chain [Bloomberg]

In other news:

Alibaba’s AliExpress is testing an invitation-only Elite membership for shoppers who spend more than $800 a year, starting in Australia, Brazil, Germany and Spain [FT]

Google is in hot water in Indonesia where it has been caught up in the scandal that led a court to sentence Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim to prison. In a new twist, the Android-maker has been ordered to return the money it made from a laptops-for-schools programme, despite weak evidence behind Makarim’s conviction.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Indonesia’s court puts Google into Chromebook corruption case

Google has been thrown into the controversial corruption case against Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim after a court ruled that the US tech giant is liable to pay back $44 million.

This week, Jakarta High Court judges cut the 10 year prison sentence given to Makarim by one year and reduced the restitution order against him from about Rp809 billion to Rp548.8 billion.

That slim reduction got most of the attention, but they also ruled that suppliers that took part in the Chromebook procurement programme at the centre of the case are liable to pay back the total amount lost by the state. The court put that amount at Rp1.568 trillion, or roughly $94 million, with Google on the hook for half of it. Makarim is deemed responsible for one-third with the remainder coming from Chromebook suppliers, principals and distributors.

The ruling doesn’t mean Google is guilty of a crime, but the court urged prosecutors to investigate the company and others that were part of the programme, which ran from 2020-2022 and distributed Google’s Chromebook devices to schools across the country.

We wrote about the case in detail when Makarim was sentenced in July. Makarim wasn’t sentenced for kickbacks, bribery or illicit payments, despite accusations, and claims that a WhatsApp group chat showed intent of criminal conspiracy before he came into office were rejected by the court.

Instead, the ruling centred around the then-minister committing “an abuse of authority” by giving the project to Google, which had invested in his startup Gojek. That was seen as a conflict of interest, even though the judges said there was no evidence that he controlled Gojek during his time in government. That’s without stating the obvious that Google’s growth wouldn’t have a material impact on its ownership stake in Gojek.

But this new twist has taken things further and brought Google directly into the chaos. The company is no longer in the background, it has been named a beneficiary. It’s not clear if prosecutors are looking into the matter more closely, but you can’t ignore that a court has called for greater scrutiny of its role.

Google appeared reluctant to get directly involved in the case. It provided a statement denying that it offered “benefits to education ministry officials in exchange for their decision to adopt Google products,” and multiple Google executives testified in Makarim’s defence, but its response felt measured despite the severity of the claims and unconvincing evidence at sentencing. At the time of publication, Google had not replied to a request for comment from ATR.

Indonesia is not a core global market, but Google has built a strong commercial presence across Android, search, cloud and investments in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. How will it respond now?

The signaling couldn’t be worse for foreign companies looking to do business in Indonesia when even Google, a new economy company that pioneers technology, is caught up in mudslinging and corruption allegations.

For Indonesia, the episode adds another uncomfortable layer to the Makarim story. A founder who became the country’s startup poster boy, then a cabinet minister, is now serving a corruption sentence. The appeal court’s decision means the case may no longer be contained to him.

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Fintech in the future of vibecoded banks

Today, you can build a bank in less than three months so how do fintech founders build a moat? And why is Southeast Asia emerging as a gaming hub, but the Japanese market alone still generates more than 10X the revenue.

Fintech and gaming were on the agenda yesterday as Jon Low, co-founder of Elephants Inc, and Dr Serkan Toto, who runs Kantan Games, joined Wing and me on The Offline Network Southeast Asia.

Catch highlights on our LinkedIn page, X account and YouTube channel.

Freed from Meta, Manus launched AI agents, video editor and game development products

Less than a month after it went independent of Meta by unwinding its $2 billion-plus acquisition, Manus announced a major new product when it introduced AI agents.

The company rose to prominence with an AI product that could handle complicated data requests and develop documents like slideshows, which saw it rocket past $100 million ARR within just eight months of launch. It also caught the attention of Meta. Now, though, Manus is competing directly with its former owner; Manus’ Cue bot competes directly with Meta’s Muse.

Cue is the splashy launch, but Manus also launched a video editor, game development product, and a number of AI agentic tools including a virtual machine for storage, harness for agents and more.

I’ve not had a chance to try them out, but the new products are in keeping with the current trends in consumer AI products, and it’ll be interesting to find out how the Meta experience helped shape their development. Both in terms of what the team learned from being inside the US tech giant, and from seeing its product pipeline.

Deals

Antom, the merchant payments unit from Ant Group, deepened its strategic investment in Indonesian payment fintech DOKU, which has now rebranded as “DOKU by Antom” and will collaborate more closely with Antom and its payment gateway 2C2P [PRNewswire]

Peak XV Partners raised its maximum Surge seed investment to $5 million per startup from $3 million, committing more than $50 million to its latest (and 12th) cohort of 18 startups, which collectively raised more than $90 million in seed funding [TechCrunch]

Samsung Electronics and five other Samsung Group companies have agreed to invest a combined $1 billion in US data centre operator Helix Digital Infrastructure, which is backed by KKR [Bloomberg]

India’s Kiwi is reportedly seeking $30-40 million to accelerate customer acquisition for its bank-issued RuPay credit cards and UPI credit lines—it raised $24 million from investors including Vertex Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Stellaris Venture Partners last year [Economic Times]

Japan plans to establish an independent agency as early as next fiscal year to invest in defense startups, support dual-use technology and promote exports. Run by the Defense Ministry and METI, the agency will invest directly in startups and private-sector funds, with legislation to establish it expected to be submitted to parliament next year. [Nikkei Asia]

Markets

Zhuhai Amicro Technology, a chip-maker backed by Xiaomi, is said to be preparing to begin premarketing for a Hong Kong IPO of more than $100 million as early as this week [SCMP]

Earnings

Shein reported second-quarter sales of $11.08 billion, up 0.9% year on year, as Europe revenue fell 13.9% to $3.77 billion and US revenue declined 6% to $2.5 billion, there was growth in Latin America but still the share price fell by 14% to reach a record low so far [Reuters]

AI and Chips

China’s industry ministry reportedly told some companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, that it intends to approve purchases of Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chips [The Information]

VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing, a joint venture between TSMC affiliate Vanguard International Semiconductor and NXP Semiconductors, is considering a second chipmaking plant in Singapore to meet rising demand [Bloomberg]

NTT and SoftBank are separately expanding cybersecurity systems that process AI data entirely within Japan, allowing companies to identify software vulnerabilities without sending sensitive data to US-based systems [Nikkei Asia]

Kuaishou’s AI spinoff unveiled Kling 4.0, its latest video-generation model which generates clips up to 30 seconds long and accepts more than a dozen text, image and video references—a full release is planned for October, while Kling is said to be planning a Hong Kong IPO [Bloomberg]

China has built more than 24GW of data centre capacity across over 1,000 facilities, with AI demand driving a shift toward large-scale hyperscaler infrastructure [SemiAnalysis]

Japanese semiconductor materials maker Resonac Holdings has developed a 300mm silicon carbide substrate that can produce four times as many chips as the 150mm substrates widely used today [Nikkei Asia]

Philippine infrastructure company YCO Cloud and Singapore-based AI cloud provider Aolani plan to deploy more than 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs in the Philippines [Aolani]

Australian data centre operator Firmus has signed agreements with Meta to provide GPU computing capacity at its facilities in Southeast Asia [Reuters]

Broadcom and Japan’s Toppan Holdings have opened Singapore’s first advanced chip substrate plant, months ahead of schedule, as the city-state expands its role in the AI supply chain [Nikkei Asia]

Samsung Electro-Mechanics will invest about $5 billion to expand chip package substrate capacity in South Korea and Vietnam amid rising AI demand [The Korea Herald]

Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT plans to invest 34.9 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) in expansion, with 22.4 billion yuan, or 93% of its R&D budget, going toward equipment purchases [SCMP]

China is building its own Hugging Face services with Alibaba’s ModelScope and OSChina’s MoArk emerging as domestic alternatives [Rest of World]

India is preparing to deploy $25 billion to support deep-tech startups as it seeks to reduce reliance on foreign technology [CNBC]

Policy

China has extended overseas travel restrictions for senior AI and chip executives at private companies to their spouses and children, requiring government approval for some foreign trips [Bloomberg]

The Indian government told the Supreme Court it will amend IT rules to prevent social media platforms from allowing users under 18 to create accounts [Times of India]

In other news:

A quiet start but Apple Pay is now available in India starting with Axis Bank cards [MacRumors]

Remember Luckin Coffee? It’s on the comeback trail and is now said to be considering expansion into Persian Gulf markets after Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala became a direct investor [CNBC]

The Philippines looks set to record its largest ever IPO with Mynt, the operator of the country’s largest digital wallet, securing nearly $600 million of initial backing from global and domestic investors. This is not your typical startup, it was founded by conglomerates, but it could start the pathway for others to go public, as we explore today.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Can the Philippines’ largest digital wallet lead other startups to IPO?

The Philippines most popular payment app is about to usher in what could be the country’s largest IPO to date, and a listing that could prompt similar exits for tech companies.

Mynt, which owns and operates the GCash app, announced it planned to go public in the Philippines back at the end of June. On Friday, it confirmed it secured commitments from more than 20 cornerstone investors who will anchor the IPO with capital. Those key backers include HSBC, IFC, Lazard, Ninety One and T Rowe Price, as well as domestic investment firms such as BPI Asset Management and Metrobank. Notably, IFC backed rival payment firm Maya

We won’t get final details on the price and raise size until October 1, but already those investors have agreed to put in 36.5 billion pesos, just over $580 million, which is nearly half of the potential raise, according to Reuters.

The IPO could raise up to 80.3 billion pesos ($1.3 billion), making it the largest share sale on record in ​the Philippines if priced at the top end of the range, surpassing Monde Nissin’s 55.89 billion peso ​IPO in 2021.

That would not only be a record, but it would smash the amount raised in the country’s listings this year to date, which sits at under $230 million, Reuters said citing LSEG data.

Southeast Asia has cried out for exits over the last decade as investors in tech companies seek to find returns on their investments. Mynt raised more than $1.2 billion from investors that include Alibaba’s Ant Group, Japan’s MUFG bank, private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Bow Wave and its founding corporate backers telecom firm Globe and conglomerate Ayala. Many of those put in capital at valuations of $2 billion or less, with Mynt last valued at $5 billion in 2024.

On the positive side, this deal could chart a route for other tech companies to reach an IPO in the Philippines. Already, Maya’s chairman has said his company is “on track” to list next year.

That’s promising, but these two companies aren’t reflective of the average tech company in the Philippines, or even Southeast Asia. They’re well backed by investors, who have ploughed in vast sums most founders can only dream of, and had the privilege of being started by conglomerates who gave them immediate unfair advantages on talent, tech, partnerships and more.

Not every startup has huge firms vying to get a return on their investment and experience in public markets. But the IPO train has to start there, and the Philippines ecosystem will hope Mynt can have a broad impact on the market, the same way that its GCash app pioneered the nation’s digital economy.

Is Southeast Asia finally producing world-class AI startups?

We spoke to US-Singapore-based VC Shiyan Koh, co-founder of pre-seed-focused investor Hustle Fund, and JX Lye, co-founder of fintech startup Acme, on Southeast Asia’s growing AI startups and features. Podcasters Jeremy Au (Brave) and Michael Smith (The Generalists) reflected on how the region has evolved in recent years.

Follow TON SEA on LinkedIn and X for video highlights. Live shows run from 6pm Singapore time every Tuesday and Thursday on our YouTube channel.

ChatGPT gets ads in Southeast Asia and ties up with Grab’s workforce

Anthropic just announced plans to open its first Singapore office in October, OpenAI announced a series of updates in Southeast Asia that show the lead it already has in the region.

The US firm announced a collaboration with Grab that will see 30,000 drivers, delivery workers and merchants given training on practical AI skills, including three-months of free access to ChatGPT Plus. The initiative is rolling out in Singapore, with plans to reach Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines later this year.

Elsewhere, OpenAI also switched on advertising for its free ChatGPT offering in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan, following its launch in India and north Asia earlier.

Southeast Asia and India are prime targets, given the popularity of freemium products in these markets, but this is a global push. ChatGPT ads are available in over 60 markets worldwide, with the company claiming it reached a $1 billion ARR less than 200 days after launch. That’s a useful statistic in the run-up to an IPO.

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Deals

India’s Brahma AI raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation to build AI-generated audiovisual tools for enterprises [Economic Times]

India’s Skyroot Aerospace is reportedly in advanced talks to raise $280–300 million at a $2.8–3 billion valuation, with Fidelity, General Catalyst and Benchmark said to be among the prospective backers [Moneycontrol]

Singapore-based iPiD, which helps banks and financial institutions tackle payment fraud, raised $16 million in a Series A led by Foundation Capital, with Citi, HSBC (which work with the startup on payment verification) and existing backers joining [Fintech News SG]

Lightspeed is apparently raising $250 million for a new India early-stage fund, about 80% of which is already committed [TechCrunch]

Markets

Singapore-based data-centre operator DayOne is reportedly pressing ahead with plans for an IPO as early as November [Reuters]

Chinese chipmaker CanSemi Technology is seeking to raise about 6.16 billion yuan ($919 million) in a Shenzhen IPO [Bloomberg]

Used-car marketplace Carro is said to be considering an SGX listing alongside its planned US IPO, which could make it the first company to use the exchange’s new dual-listing mechanism with Nasdaq [Bloomberg]

SK Hynix’s US unit Solidigm is considering an IPO as early as next year that could raise $15 billion at a $150 billion valuation [Reuters]

Earnings

DeepSeek’s annualised revenue run rate has reportedly passed $1 billion, more than doubling in a few months, as it targets a 50 billion yuan ($7.5 billion) fundraise at a 500 billion yuan valuation [The Information]

AI and Chips

Anthropic reported disrupting a Beijing-aligned operation to monitor religious leaders and diaspora communities, including a DC-based advocacy group for Tibet [WSJ]

Chinese authorities are surveying Broadcom switches in state-controlled data centres as Beijing presses operators to cut reliance on foreign AI infrastructure [FT]

London-based neocloud provider Nscale disclosed ByteDance’s role as a customer only in an obscure IPO filing, despite the Chinese company accounting for nearly three-quarters of its sales last year [FT]

DeepSeek published DSec, a training method intended to help AI agents learn more efficiently while reducing unwanted behaviour [Bloomberg]

Israel’s Tower Semiconductor plans its largest optical-communications chip hub in Japan as demand builds for silicon photonics in AI servers [Nikkei Asia]

India’s Sarvam AI launched Vision 2.1, a vision model aimed at making forms, tables and handwritten records easier to digitise across India’s regional scripts [Economic Times]

India’s government says Tata Group’s $14 billion semiconductor and electronics investments will proceed despite a leadership dispute at the conglomerate [Bloomberg]

India is considering an anchor commitment of Rs 15,000–20,000 crore (about $2 billion) for a frontier-AI fund to finance GPU clusters, specialised data centres and other infrastructure [Economic Times]

Crypto

US prosecutors charged Vietnamese national Trung Nguyen Van over an alleged role in a crypto pig-butchering scam that drew about $16 million from one victim [The Block]

Policy

Thailand approved its first national semiconductor and advanced-electronics strategy, targeting about $80 billion in cumulative investment and $150 billion in annual industry revenue by 2050 [Thailand Board of Investment]

Singapore launched SG Semiconductor, a national identity for the industry focused on advanced packaging, silicon photonics, power electronics and chip design, backed by S$800 million ($590 million) in R&D through 2030 [Singapore EDB]

Cambodia will host a two-day anti-scam conference in Phnom Penh with officials from more than a dozen countries as it seeks to demonstrate a crackdown on industrial-scale fraud compounds [Reuters]

India is investigating LG Electronics and Samsung over allegations they paid lower tariffs on imported OLED display components [Reuters]

India’s food regulator has begun action against Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, BigBasket and Zepto over alleged misbranding, misleading claims and prohibited food products [Bloomberg]

Vietnam is preparing food-safety rules that would require delivery platforms such as Shopee and Grab to show sellers’ registration details and provide reporting channels [Nikkei Asia]

In other news:

An Indonesian court cut former Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim’s prison sentence to nine years from 10 on appeal in a graft case tied to laptop procurement [Reuters]

India’s Dixon Technologies is moving beyond smartphone assembly into higher-margin components as it aims to become one of the world’s five largest electronics manufacturers within a decade [Bloomberg]

India’s battery-cell ambitions are running into Chinese technology restrictions, with JSW pausing plans for a 50GWh LFP plant in Odisha after failing to secure a partner [Nikkei Asia]

Amazon plans to invest $3 billion in India’s quick-commerce business by 2030, including $1 billion by the end of 2027 [Reuters]

Amazon’s Kuiper received a Vietnamese licence to operate a private satellite telecommunications network linking satellites with ground infrastructure [TechNode]

Tencent launched a competitor to Alipay for visitors to China wanting to use digital payments. Its TenPayGo service is essentially WeChat Pay, without the need for the messaging app, which has a complicated sign-up process for international users. Alipay is still the go-to, but this may be a decent insurance policy bet if you do travel to China. [TenPay on X]

Alibaba’s transition into AI has been slower than it could have been and certainly more painful, but today it stands one of tech’s most credible forces. Yesterday, it showed its might with a series of big announcements across the holy trinity of AI: models, chips and compute. The markets loved it. Let’s dive in.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Alibaba makes big announcements on AI model and AI chip plans

Alibaba’s push into artificial intelligence helped the Chinese company’s share price recover to some semblance of pandemic highs last year. Now, the company is doubling down on AI with ambitious plans for significantly more powerful AI models and a new AI chip on the hardware side.

The headline is arguably CEO Eddie Wu’s announcement that Qwen, Alibaba’s AI, will soon boast models that include 5 trillion-10 trillion parameters in order to tackle “more complex, longer-horizon tasks,” Reuters reported. Its current flagship, Qwen 3.8 Max, has 2.4 ​trillion parameters so this would be a significant upgrade.

Those upcoming models are currently in training, according to the company, which made the reveals at its annual Apsara event for Alibaba Cloud. Qwen models do not currently train themselves (recursive self improvement, RSI, is a major goal for AI model companies), but Wu said there’s been “meaningful” progress on that front, though he did not provide specifics.

Outside of software, Alibaba’s second big punch was hardware as it announced a new AI chip that would compete with Nvidia and others to slot into AI data centres, Bloomberg reported.

Zhenwu V900, the new chip from Alibaba’s T-Head division, can be combined into 50,000 chip clusters in order to train and power frontier AI models, Wu said.

Alibaba wants to back that up with more compute capacity, with Wu targeting 20 GW of data centre capacity worldwide for Alibaba Cloud by 2032. Europe is a focus with new cloud regions for Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands coming. That’s more modest than goals set by SoftBank, which is commissioning multiple 10 GW plants, but it may be more realistic if Alibaba can source the raw materials it needs, which the whole industry is battling for.

E-commerce was always Alibaba’s bread and butter. It rode high with a record share price of nearly $305 in late 2020, valuing it at over $850 billion, as the Covid-19 pandemic saw online spending surge. As the world came out of lockdown, the company looked flatfooted, particularly when generative AI boomed following the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023.

But, after a sustained rebuild and the return of the likes of Jack Ma, Alibaba’s AI pivot began to strike a positive chord with investors last year, sending its shares to nearly $180 by September 2025, their highest price for four years.

Alibaba has pledged to spend $53 billion on cloud and AI infrastructure, but the share price has fallen since those heights. Still, the firm has picked up plaudits for a strong approach to AI. That included developing Qwen into a strong and capable model, particularly in the open weight category, whilst building AI into the core of Alibaba’s commercial businesses. The company has taken a more long-term view than competitors like Tencent, although the latter has taken a leaf out of Alibaba’s book by rebuilding its core model.

These new developments are a continuation of that push, and markets reacted positively with Baba shares up as much as 5%. To continue the positivity, Alibaba will need to show proof points of the strategy, which will take time to show results.

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AI at the centre of upcoming Trump-Xi meeting

While Alibaba was out revealing its future plans, the US and China’s relationship over AI is reaching a notable moment with President Trump set to meet President Xi this week.

In the lead-up, the two countries have established a formal dialogue around AI. But Xi is not likely to bring Chinese tech executives with him to Washington for the meeting. That’s a shame. If not only for the fact that these events often make some remarkable photo opportunities.

Then there’s Anthropic’s allegations that pretty much every Chinese AI firm is distilling from Claude, which would make for good dinner table chat.

The Information reports that China’s internet regulator isn’t so amused. It is said to be investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI after Anthropic claimed the two companies sent sensitive state data directly to its Claude service.

There may not be major deals, according to Trump. But, as always, who can know.

DeepSeek and co may not be in Washington, but the company will brief the UN Security Council on AI risks. That feels like a strong validation, even if not from the White House.

Deals

Indian e-commerce startup CityMall is reportedly in talks to raise 4 billion to 5 billion rupees ($47 million to 58million) in a round led by Jungle Ventures at a valuation of about 40 billion rupees ($470 million) [Economic Times]

SoftBank is seeking to raise more than $11 billion through a bond sale to fund the third tranche of its OpenAI investment, including $10 billion of dollar bonds and €1 billion ($1.2 billion) of euro bonds [FT]

Singapore-based Nexstrom raised $12 million from Xora, Foothill Ventures and SEEDS, taking its total funding to $15 million as it develops 2D-material deposition equipment for next-generation chipmaking [TechCrunch]

Indian agentic AI startup Sol, founded by former Cred executives, raised $4 million from General Catalyst, Nexus Venture Partners, Z47’s DeVC, Peercheque and Cred founder Kunal Shah [Economic Times]

Markets

Shares in Chinese fibre-optic equipment maker Ligent Technologies rose as much as 19.2% on their Hong Kong debut after its HK$5.67 billion ($723 million) IPO, riding demand for AI-related equipment [Nikkei Asia]

SoftBank-backed SB Energy has slowed plans for an IPO at a valuation of about $50 billion as investors question demand for AI data centres, while the company has yet to bring one online [FT]

Kakao opposed a proposed US ADR listing of Kakao Mobility based solely on TPG’s stake, blocking an exit route for the private equity firm that would have raised no new capital for the company [Reuters]

Accel and Tiger Global-backed digital lender Moneyview is seeking a valuation of 598.5 billion rupees ($600 million) in its IPO, about 20% below its 2022 valuation [Economic Times]

AI and Chips

Well that didn’t take long: US investors are questioning whether a planned 4,000-acre AI and manufacturing hub in the Philippines can proceed amid protests and online opposition to the Washington-backed Pax Silica Initiative [Bloomberg]

DeepSeek is reportedly planning to use more domestic chips for AI model training, with Huawei expected to begin delivering training chips as early as the fourth quarter [The Information]

Taiwan broke ground on an advanced-packaging park in Kaohsiung where TSMC will build a technology-validation lab and talent-training centre, with operations expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2029 [Reuters]

Singapore-based BDx Data Centers has broken ground on its 640MW Jatiluhur AI data-centre campus in West Java, having secured 845MVA of grid capacity from Indonesian utility PLN [The Business Times] [Disclosure: BDx Data Centers is an Ellerton & Co. client]

Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model is now available through Amazon Bedrock, giving its open-weight models a route to more commercial customers [SCMP]

Xiaomi is open-sourcing its MiMo-V2.6 models, including its new flagship MiMo-V2.6-Pro, while rolling out a faster Pro-UltraSpeed version [Xiaomi]

Tencent launched its Hy Image 3.5 Preview image-generation model and is integrating it into Yuanbao and its film-editing and design tools as it competes with ByteDance and Alibaba [Bloomberg]

China is accelerating nuclear research to meet AI data-centre power demand, with more than half of the world’s 58 conventional reactors under construction located in the country [FT]

In other news:

Nothing CEO Carl Pei announced plans to spin off budget smartphone and electronics unit CMF into a standalone, majority Indian-owned business with its own management and research teams [Bloomberg]

Indonesia’s challenger banks Superbank, SeaBank and Bank Jago are gaining customers with high deposit rates and consumer-platform ties, with Superbank’s deposits rising 89% to 15.9 trillion rupiah ($889 million) in the first half of 2026 [Nikkei Asia]

Hong Kong’s Animoca Brands and Nasdaq-listed Currenc have suspended talks on a reverse merger that would have taken Animoca public, citing deal timelines and changing market conditions [The Block]

PhonePe has received initial approval from the UAE central bank for licences covering retail payments, card schemes and stored-value facilities [Reuters]

Taiwan’s export orders surged 71.4% year on year to a record $102.96 billion in August, driven by global AI demand and marking a 19th straight month of growth. Orders totaled $704.99 billion in the first eight months of 2026, up 55% from a year earlier. [Focus Taiwan]

Singapore is gearing up to become the driverless car hub for Southeast Asia after Waymo, the Google-owned service, announced a planned expansion just as Grab plans to extend its initial pilot service. Things won’t change right away, but things should get cooking by 2028, as we explain.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Waymo is making a push into Asia

Singapore’s ride-hailing scene is about to get more competitive after Waymo, Google’s electric vehicle taxi company, announced plans to enter the country in 2027. Don’t expect to see driverless cars popping up across Singapore just yet, however. The plan for next year is to establish operations and move patiently, Waymo explained.

In the coming months: Our initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles will arrive in Singapore as we establish our local operations.

Readiness phase in 2027: Trained autonomous specialists will conduct initial manual driving, adapting the Waymo Driver to local road geometry, monsoon weather patterns, and more.

Public Commercial Launch in 2028: We intend to open our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to riders in Singapore through the Waymo app.

Japan is a good example. Waymo announced plans to bring its service to Tokyo two years ago, and only now is it saying it will open its doors next year after extensive testing and preparation. Waymo’s Japanese service will see the US firm link up with taxi providers Nihon Kotsu and GO, the taxi-booking platform that recently held Japan’s largest IPO of the year.

That might mean there’s room for cooperation in Singapore as and when the product gets closer to launch. Google has been in Singapore for more than 15 years, but it doesn’t have a consumer transportation service it can immediately switch on to start serving customers. That could mean opportunities for existing cab companies, and maybe even Grab. Google isn’t a Grab investor (it backed Gojek), but Grab is the obvious go-to if you want to launch a service in Southeast Asia.

Still, Grab has been busy plotting its own route to EVs and self-driving cars.

Its recent spending spree, which has seen it splash nearly $1.5 billion on fintech company Atome and explore market expansion with the $600 million acquisition of Foodpanda Taiwan, began with autonomous vehicle deals. Late last year, it bought stakes in Waymo’s Chinese competitor WeRide, lidar-maker Hesai, autonomous driving enabler Momenta and remote driving startup Vay to tool up its vehicle tech smarts, presumably with a view to offer more services across Southeast Asia.

As it stands, Grab and WeRide run a small trial service in Singapore with 10 vehicles, but last week plans to expand to 50 cars and a wider-reaching service were announced, subject to regulatory approval.

Adding Waymo to the mix makes things a little spicier, but the driverless revolution isn’t coming to Singapore just yet. That’ll need time. And you’ll be waiting even longer if you’re in another part of Southeast Asia.

In another challenge to Grab, Vietnam’s Green SM is adding e-scooters to its already promising EV ride-hailing service in Indonesia.

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AI reportedly false flagged Chinese vessel as nuclear threat

Here’s a worrying report which claims that an “AI-assisted” US military intelligence report falsely flagged a Chinese vessel as carrying components for a nuclear weapons programme. The false flag nearly prompted an operation to intercept and board the ship, according to CNN.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The incident is said to have taken place during the Iran war. Action at that moment could have prompted a war, one source told CNN.

We don’t know much about how AI is used for military reports, or which AI is even used, but this obviously shows the shortfalls.

Deals

Singapore-based stablecoin payments firm dtcpay raised $25 million in a Series A round, with Japan’s SBI Group joining as a strategic investor [The Block]

Beijing-based Naive AI raised $400 million across three funding rounds, valuing the startup at more than $1.4 billion as it prepares to release its first open-weight large language model [The Information]

Markets

The Philippines is set to usher in its first major tech IPO after Mynt, the parent of fintech and payment app GCash, received approval to go public and raise $1.47 billion. The listing is targeted for 20 October. [Bloomberg]

Unitree Robotics shares have fallen 53% from their 19 August debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as investors reassess the humanoid-robot maker’s valuation [Nikkei Asia]

Manus is again reported to be exploring a Hong Kong IPO as it raises fresh capital following its separation from Meta [WSJ]

SoftBank’s planned IPO of US data centre developer SB Energy, at a $50 billion valuation, faces uncertainty as investors wait for clearer signs of when OpenAI will go public [FT]

Chinese automation equipment maker RoboTechnik is set to launch a Hong Kong listing seeking to raise about $800 million, with trading due to begin on September 29 [Reuters]

Chips

Nexperia fell out with Chinese parent Wingtech and now it is looking to India to help fill the hole after it agreed a deal with Tata Electronics to manufacture and package power-control chips via Tata’s $11 billion Dholera plant [Reuters]

Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT is preparing to enter the flash memory market, taking on Samsung and domestic rival YMTC as the global memory shortage persists [Reuters]

CXMT said its fifth-generation technology platform has entered mass production, improving die yields and energy efficiency as it narrows the gap with Samsung and SK Hynix [SCMP]

SK Hynix subsidiary Solidigm is considering a NAND flash factory in the US, potentially in upstate New York [Reuters]

Chinese researchers have developed a preliminary route to sub-3nm gate-all-around chips using deep ultraviolet lithography, potentially reducing the impact of restrictions on ASML’s EUV machines [SCMP]

Japan’s Screen is expanding into India, betting on growth around the country’s push to build a semiconductor industry [Nikkei Asia]

Sojitz plans a specialist logistics hub near Tata Electronics’ Dholera fab, positioning itself for India’s semiconductor build-out [Nikkei Asia]

AI

We’ve written a lot about the China-US AI revenue sales gap, so it’s notable that seven leading Chinese AI developers generated an estimated $10.7 billion in annual recurring revenue between March and August, roughly a tenth of the combined figure reported by OpenAI and Anthropic [SCMP]

Z.ai patched a flaw in its ZCode coding assistant after developers found it was uploading local workspace data to external servers without explicit consent [SCMP]

Iran, China and groups in Israel have used Chinese AI models and autonomous agents to run influence campaigns across major social platforms, US officials and security researchers say [NYT]

Ant International is rolling out its largest product upgrade to date, embedding AI agents across payments, foreign exchange and treasury platforms including Alipay+, Antom and WorldFirst [SCMP]

Alibaba’s Damo Academy has open-sourced Damo Radar, an AI model that analyses CT scans for 146 abdominal diseases and abnormalities [SCMP]

Anthropic and OpenAI are expanding in Singapore, raising demand for central office space as the city-state pushes to become a global AI hub [FT]

Alibaba’s Qwen open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1, a 7-billion-parameter image model that combines generation and editing, including transparent-image support [Qwen]

Policy

Meta will report CSAM cases directly to Indian law enforcement after allegations that Instagram carried paid ads promoting the material, amid warnings that it could lose intermediary protections [BBC]

North Korean hackers known as WaterPlum stole more than $10.5 million from job seekers by posing as AI and blockchain companies, infecting at least 30,000 devices across 100 countries [The Record]

In related news: countries have launched legal action against North Korean nationals and local facilitators following a UN report on Pyongyang’s illicit overseas IT-worker scheme [The Record]

India’s telecom regulator TRAI has ordered caller-ID and call-management apps to share users’ spam reports with operators through the industry’s blockchain-based anti-spam platform [TechCrunch]

A China Central Television-affiliated account criticised Anthropic’s privacy-policy revisions, claiming they raise the risk of user data being shared with US intelligence agencies [Bloomberg]

US prosecutors accused Huawei of running a far-reaching criminal scheme involving alleged Iran-sanctions violations and trade-secret theft [ICIJ]

China’s market regulator will step up scrutiny of aggressive price competition, including through cost investigations, price inspections and tighter platform rules [Bloomberg]

The US and China agreed to establish a formal AI dialogue ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi Jinping this week [FT]

In other news:

Apple is reportedly preparing to (finally) launch Apple Pay in India next month with Axis Bank credit cards [Reuters]

Sea wants to dogfood its staff on its own bank after it asked Singapore staff to take their salaries via MariBank accounts. A signal to boost flagging usage or a valuable way to get feedback on a key new(ish) product? [The Straits Times]

SK Hynix has launched SK Hynix Ventures, a Silicon Valley corporate venture capital arm focused on AI and next-generation infrastructure [SK Hynix]

CATL is said to have developed taller batteries designed for American pickup trucks, despite trade and security barriers keeping the Chinese battery maker largely out of the US market [FT]

It’s been a few months since we argued Anthropic is missing out in Southeast Asia, and now the company is officially moving in with plans to open a Singapore office in October. OpenAI is reaching two years since it came to Singapore, and the presence of the world’s top two AI firms will open yet more opportunities in the region.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Anthropic, Plaud and Databricks show Singapore remains top pick

Singapore is finally welcoming Anthropic, after the creator of Claude announced that it will open an office in the country next month.

The US giant has prioritised other markets in Asia to date, opening offices in Japan, Korea, India and Australia before venturing to the little red dot. Why so? Well, India has incredible scale, Japan and Korea have strong enterprise sales potential (not to mention key AI allies) and Australia punches at a Western rate.

Long-time Googler Dale Finlay will lead its ASEAN team (interestingly he moved over from OpenAI, according to LinkedIn) but the Singapore-based workforce will be modest. Anthropic is hiring for just nine roles. OpenAI has a headstart on its rival in Southeast Asia, where it has joined government initiatives in Singapore, launched an accelerator programme with the Thai government and partnered with Shopee on e-commerce and hackathons.

The two big US AI companies being present in the region likely means better deals for corporates, but also (hopefully) more opportunities for developers with hackathons, accelerators, partnerships and other programmes.

That’s not all for Singapore’s AI ambitions. Plaud, which sells a notetaking device, opened its APAC HQ in the country and said that it plans to invest at least $20 million locally on engineering, product development and operations. In addition, Databricks, the enterprise data firm valued at over $180 billion, said it plans to spend over $350 million in Singapore over the next three years, with the goal of doubling its headcount in the country to more than 500 staff. Like Anthropic and OpenAI, it is said to be planning an IPO soon.

We know Singapore is a major hub for technology in Asia, and these deals are further validation. They follow major acquisition deals for Tazapay (bought by Circle for $400 million) and Atome (bought by Grab for an initial $1.5 billion), both of which are headquartered in the country.

How do VCs find and analyse startups in Southeast Asia?

We quizzed two top investors, Monk’s Hill Ventures’ principal Maansi Vohra and Analog Ventures founder Tiang Lim Foo, on yesterday’s livestream on The Offline Network Southeast Asia.

Follow TON SEA on LinkedIn and X for the video highlights. Live shows run from 6pm Singapore time every Tuesday and Thursday on our YouTube channel.

Z.ai raises $5 billion as China’s AI war intensifies

With DeepSeek and Moonshot AI reportedly planning huge IPOs to raise truckloads of cash, one of the original publicly-listed Chinese AI firms has shown the benefits of public markets. Z.ai just secured $5 billion in new funding to give it an admirable war chest as it continues to grow its business.

We looked earlier this month at how Z.ai and MiniMax have evolved their businesses since their IPOs at the start of the year in response to the surge of Chinese AI models in global markets. That’s seen a huge jump in revenue but spiralling development costs, and a move away from on-premise sales.

The initial numbers, the first release by any public AI company, show two companies in the midst of navigating business model changes. The models change rapidly, and the numbers lag. Indeed, Z.ai has already raised its annual revenue target by 25%, less than a month after filing that inaugural earnings report. The figure is now forecast to reach $3 billion, which doubtless helped close this $5 billion injection.

That mirrors a recent disclosure from Moonshot AI, which Bloomberg reported was on track to grow its annual recurring revenue (ARR, a calculation of annual revenue based on sales during a particular period) to $2 billion. A week prior, leaks around its public listing plans suggested the figure was just $300 million. Zhipu’s aforementioned earnings showed it was on track to do over $170 million in annual revenue.

I love a good public battle that involves ‘controlled’ leaks to the media. Particularly when a bunch of rivals are trying to justify valuations and appeal to investors for fundraising. When the tide goes out, who will be swimming naked, as Warren Buffett would say.

In related news, Moonshot is said to be courting investor interest from Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

While we also have the explosive revelations from Anthropic’s latest report on how it claims Chinese labs are distilling its models to develop their own.

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Deals

Manus is seeking $500 million in its first funding round since Beijing ordered it to separate from Meta, a deal that could double the agentic AI startup’s valuation to $4 billion [Bloomberg]

Activate, the venture firm founded by Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish, raised $105 million for its first fund to back Indian AI companies [Economic Times]

Teachers’ Venture Growth invested about $40 million more in Indian SaaS startup Darwinbox, taking its total commitment to roughly $80 million [Economic Times]

Shanghai-based Anew Labs, ByteDance’s former AI drug discovery unit, raised $290 million in its first external funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by HSG, IDG Capital and Hillhouse Investment [Reuters]

D-Robotics, a Hong Kong robotics startup, announced it raised $400 million in Series C funding but it did not name any of its investors [FinSMEs]

Markets

Kuku Technologies, the parent of Indian audio platforms Kuku FM and Kuku TV, received Sebi approval for its proposed IPO and is targeting a first-half 2027 listing at a valuation of about ₹15,000 crore ($1.7 billion) [Economic Times]

AI

Huawei rotating chairman Eric Xu said Chinese AI developers should keep building more powerful models while managing safety risks, arguing the country’s systems are not yet advanced enough to encounter the most serious frontier concerns [Reuters]

South Korea’s deputy prime minister said the country cannot afford to slow AI development, pushing back against calls for a more cautious pace [Bloomberg]

China is debating whether English should become an optional school subject as AI translation improves and job prospects change [NYT]

Chips

SK Hynix is in talks with Intel about making memory chips in the US for the first time, through either a lease at Intel’s planned Ohio facility or a joint venture with cloud companies [Reuters]

SK Hynix agreed to pay half of its profit-sharing bonus in cash, resolving a union dispute that had threatened to disrupt production at the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker [Bloomberg]

Huawei unveiled its Ascend 960 SuperPoD computing cluster and upgraded its UnifiedBus interconnect, using near-packaged optics to connect up to 4,000 processors as it pushes for an alternative to Nvidia [SCMP]

Chinese smartphone makers are turning to domestic memory chipmaker CXMT for flagship devices, cutting their reliance on Samsung and SK Hynix as the global memory shortage tightens [SCMP]

Applied Materials will invest $5 billion in India over the next decade to expand its operations as the country pushes to build a domestic semiconductor industry [Reuters]

Japan and the US are discussing plans to build a semiconductor plant in the US as part of Japan’s $550 billion investment package tied to their tariff agreement [Nikkei Asia]

Policy

Indonesia will require e-commerce platforms to collect income tax from sellers from October 1, a month earlier than previously announced [Reuters]

US and Chinese security experts proposed red lines around AI systems that could trigger military conflict, including safeguards for nuclear command networks and major cyber operations [Reuters]

South Korean police booked 26 Polymarket users on illegal-gambling suspicions after they placed combined wagers of 17.6 billion won ($12.7 million), with 18 referred to prosecutors [The Block]

In other news:

Xpeng is in talks to license its electric vehicle technology to more overseas partners, including its electronic architecture, AI chips and driver-assistance software [Reuters]

India’s software-services exports now equal about 5.2% of GDP, up from 3.3% before the pandemic, while business-services exports have more than doubled to 3.3% as the sector moves into higher-value work [Bloomberg]

Grab’s rumoured deal to buy Atome has come through, giving us the Singapore’s firm’s largest acquisition to date, a notable Southeast Asia exit and a new reason for Grab to convince us that it will finally come good on its fintech growth promise, nearly 5 years after going public.

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Grab doubles down on fintech with more M&A

Grab announced plans to acquire Atome Financial in a deal that values the Singapore-based buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider at upwards of $2 billion.

The deal was first reported by Bloomberg last week, and now that it is official the full details will see Grab acquire an initial 60% of Atome for $1.49 billion. The remaining 40% will be acquired by Grab over the next two years at a valuation of between $2 billion and $4.5 billion based on how Atome performs. All in all, Grab could pay a total of nearly $3.3 billion for the business, although half of the second transaction would be in cash so the total would also depend on Grab’s share price performance. Ultimately, this leaves skin in the game for Atome’s founders, staff and investors.

Grab is buying Atome to beef up its fintech business, which had always been the potential growth engine but hasn’t hit that potential since Grab went public nearly five years ago, as noted during Q2 earnings in August:

Revenue from Grab’s financial services business grew by 59% year-on-year in Q2, having grown 43% in Q1. But it accounts for just $134 million of its total $997 million revenue right now.

Adding Atome brings BNPL services across five major Southeast Asian countries and adds directly to the early promise of Grab’s lending business. That loanbook is expected to more than double from $2.3 billion right now to over $6 billion by 2028. There’s clearly overlap and synergy, the question is whether the two companies can integrate and scale sufficiently to add serious revenue.

The deal seems obvious in hindsight, given Grab’s cash reserves and growing appetite for M&A, as we said last week:

Grab has more than $5 billion in cash to spend and, as we’ve said repeatedly, it will use that for strategic M&A. It made a series of investments in autonomous vehicle tech last year, acquired US-based investment platform Stash and it is moving into a new market with the $600 million purchase of Foodpanda Taiwan.

Looking more broadly, this acquisition is important for Southeast Asia for a few reasons.

Exits, exits, exits.

Yes, $3 billion is a big one. Southeast Asia has been starved of exits of any size, let alone those that return decent money to investors. It may not be the tens of billions level, but it will put the region on the map, and give those who backed Atome a solid return that isn’t just on paper.

Secondly, this is a rare deal happening within the region. You don’t often see local market consolidation, it’s typically outsiders coming in (for example, US-based Circle buying Singapore’s Tazapay this month) and we’ve never seen a local-local transaction at this scale. Companies outside of Southeast Asia don’t know the region like those inside it do and they have less reason to shop here, we need to see more of this at scale.

Founders and VCs I spoke to are hopeful that Tazapay’s sale for $400 million and Grab-Atome will signify an uptick in deals and sentiment. Southeast Asia certainly needs both.

As for Grab, investors aren’t buying it yet. Grab’s share price is down nearly 4% since the announcement, nearly 19% over the past month, and even Jim Cramer had a dismissive few words to say. But that might not be a bad thing.

Atome is an Ellerton client, this analysis is based on public facts and prior reporting. For more, read our disclaimer.

If you want more Southeast Asia insights, check out Offline Network Southeast Asia, a new YouTube live show where Singapore-based VC Wing Vasiksiri and I interview founders, VC and operators from the region. The show runs Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6-7pm Singapore time with highlights posted on social media.

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India introduces merchant fees for UPI… and it goes exactly as you’d think

India’s UPI has been lauded as an example of what modern digital payments infrastructure looks like and can do at scale. It’s revolutionised the way money moves in the country, thanks also to the explosion of affordable internet and smartphones. Now, though, it is in a controversial moment after announcing plans to introduce merchant fees for the first time.

Starting 15 October, the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the network, will charge a 0.4% merchant fee on certain payments above ₹2,000, or around $21. Merchant fees will be capped at ₹300 (about $3) for transactions of ₹75,000 (around $783) or more, while payments of ₹2,000 or less will remain free. Likewise, smaller merchants that receive no more than ₹100,000 (about $1,041) per month via UPI will be exempt from the charges.

For reference, credit card merchant fees typically range from 1.5% to 2.5% per transaction, while debit card fees are capped at 0.9%, according to information released by NPCI.

The measures seem reasonable and made with the aim of long-term sustainability. However, the communication hasn’t been clear. A previous leak made the exact plans and rates unclear, and there’s even been wild claims that India is kowtowing to the demands of US payment companies… to keep things more competitive?… can’t really understand that one…

There’s an interesting argument that banks can afford it since they are saving spend since ATM withdrawal volume is lower, but broadly this feels like an approach that has its merits. They just don’t appear to have been clearly explained or understood. Any situation that involves taking away something people enjoyed for free is going to cause criticism, and so that has come to pass.

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Deals

Antler, Bertelsmann India Investments, Jungle Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kae Capital are among the funds stepping up deeptech investments in India, where startups have raised $574 million across 61 deals this year [Economic Times]

Markets

China’s Ligent Technologies, which makes fibre optic communications equipment, is reportedly seeking HK$5.67 billion ($723 million) in a Hong Kong IPO to expand production, it already has $340 million in cornerstone backing [Reuters]

DeepSeek is hiring GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao as its first CFO perhaps in preparation for a future IPO [Reuters]

Shanghai Biren Technology, a Chinese Nvidia alternative, is weighing another $1 billion share sale [Bloomberg]

Japan’s Kioxia is said to be considering raising at least $10 billion through a US listing of American depositary receipts [Bloomberg]

Earnings

It isn’t public yet but ByteDance’s first-half net profit reportedly fell by a single-digit percentage to about $20 billion as it stepped up AI spending—revenue rose around 30% to $120 billion [The Information]

AI and Chips

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix rejected a proposal to prepay about 25 trillion won ($18 billion) of electricity bills to help fund grids for South Korea’s new semiconductor and AI clusters [KED Global]

Japan’s Kioxia-linked startup EmotionX is preparing a cloud service built on fully homomorphic encryption, allowing data to be analysed without being decrypted [Nikkei Asia]

OpenRouter launched In-Region Routing to enable US customers to keep AI requests and data inside the country as Chinese open-weight models gain traction on its platform [The New Stack]

MediaTek is working with customers to make its mobile chips more efficient as memory shortages raise component costs [Nikkei Asia]

Hong Kong’s data-centre ambitions have hit a financing test after the sole bidder for a Sandy Ridge site sought HK$20 billion ($2.6 billion) to fund the project [Bloomberg]

Crypto

Hong Kong-founded CoinEx is shutting down after a prolonged crypto-market downturn and rising compliance costs, months after a report showed the exchange was popular with Iranian users [WSJ]

US prosecutors say two Chinese companies used Binance accounts to launder $61 million from Iranian oil sales, part of more than $1.5 billion in alleged illicit proceeds [FT]

Policy

Hanoi police fined a resident who urged Grab drivers to stop work in protest, saying the posts spread unverified information about the Singapore-based ride-hailing company [TechNode]

China will create a BRICS open-source AI community and expand cooperation on large language models, President Xi Jinping said at the bloc’s summit in New Delhi [CNBC]

Beijing will ban recreational drones and drone parts from November 15 after a light plane crashed into the city’s tallest skyscraper, a buyback programme will offer owners up to 3,000 yuan ($447) to part with their drone [Bloomberg]

India’s consumer regulator is examining Apple’s warranty terms after claims that an iOS 18 update damaged iPhones and left users with expensive repair bills [Reuters]

Indian police will question Google after uncovering a network that created more than 500,000 Gmail accounts to send hoax bomb threats, with two people arrested [Reuters]

Norwegian authorities are investigating whether Telenor aided crimes against humanity through its former work with Myanmar’s military regime, including concerns over customer data [The Record]

In other news:

Tesla set up a Vietnam unit in Ho Chi Minh City that can import, export and distribute vehicles, laying groundwork for a move into the domestic EV market that’s dominated by local powerhouse VinFast [Nikkei Asia]

Chinese hackers-for-hire are operating increasingly like private intelligence agencies, using AI and other tools to steal material for the country’s security services [WSJ]

Waymo, Japanese taxi app GO and Nihon Kotsu are targeting Japan’s first fully autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027, initially with a small fleet [Reuters]

Amazon India’s quick-commerce unit Now has crossed a $1 billion annualised sales run rate a little over a year after launch, and plans to reach 100 cities and 1,000 dark stores by year-end [Economic Times]

ICBC’s London branch helped Huawei move $1 billion out of the UK days after the US indicted the Chinese tech giant, bypassing internal checks to support a Beijing favourite [ICIJ]

An India media startup got the internet talking after adopting AI enabled it to double sales in a year to cross $500 million in projected annual revenue, but at what cost? Its platform appears full of slop, which raises questions over who its customers are and how much AI generated content they will put up with.

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Can AI slop lay the pathway to a billion-dollar funding round and IPO?

AI is helping one of India’s media businesses supersize its production and reach global markets like never before. Pocket FM, a platform for audio content, made waves last week when it claimed to have doubled its annual revenue rate (ARR) to over $500 million in just one year, but at what cost does embracing AI for media come at?

The company started out in 2018 to fill the time commuting to and from work with podcasts and other audio entertainment shows, raising close to $200 million from investors like Tencent and Lightspeed. Its last round in 2024 came at a $750 million value, and it claims to have more than 250 million listeners from across over 20 countries.

Pocket FM monetises using advertising and a pay-as-you-go model requiring users to buy credit to access shows, as it found an all-encompassing subscription like Netflix and Spotify didn’t land. Pocket FM claims more than 550,000 writers registered to its service. Writers release content and take a cut of revenues made. If the company sees a writer with promise, they back them with resources and help.

That was the model, but adopting AI has enabled it to massively increase its library of content, which it says are driving audience growth, retention and monetisation. Previously, making 100 hours of content took a year, but that can now be done in just one day, CEO Rohan Nayak told TechCrunch. AI now “powers” 93% of the platform’s content, he added.

Indeed, a deal with AI audio startup ElevenLabs helps Pocket FM writers make audio content “with one click.” This all screams AI slop, and quite justifiably. I am not the target audience, but Pocket FM’s service does not appeal to me in the slightest when I open it.

Programme tiles are clearly AI generated. When I did open an episode, the narration was in a voice easily identifiable as not human with video that was also obviously not made by a person. Pocket FM has joined the bandwagon of AI-generated microdramas, which do all of the above in vertical frames with episodes of up to 90-120 seconds.

This is not my taste, although the company claims it is working. According to the TechCrunch story, its Pocket Saga app has reached a $15 million ARR just three months after launch with the US its only market right now. The US accounts for 70% of revenue, with revenue in Germany and France reaching $21 million in 11 months and $10 million in three months, respectively, Nayak wrote on LinkedIn.

“Our Bet [is that] In ~3 years we will be able to produce [a] Naruto-like series for $1000,” he added. “Netflix has to spend $17 billion to find 100 Blockbusters per year. What happens when you can produce 1 million high quality shows for $1 billion?”

Pocket FM may have found a way to make money from AI slop videos and audio, but there’s no valid comparison to be made to Netflix, which is cinematic in contrast to Pocket FM. Its revenue success is hardly panacea to the creative industry, which has been polarised by generative AI, despite recent agreements like ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association inking a copyright pact.

It also hasn’t been plain sailing for Pocket FM. The company let go of more than 100 employees in May, that’s around 10% of its workforce, with reports that more cuts would come.

So why is the company speaking up now? If you want to get cynical, it has been streamlining its costs to look good for investors.

It was linked with a $100-$120 million funding round in April. In June, it was reported to have begun discussions to shift its holding structure back to India (from the US) to enable a domestic IPO. Nayak told TechCrunch that there’s no immediate plan for a listing in India.

The founders will want to position their business as a global and AI-first company to maximise their valuation, and potential for a US IPO. The data looks promising on paper, until you open the app and use the product.

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America’s AI giants are poaching from big tech to grow in Asia

OpenAI and Anthropic are the new big tech, and that’s showing with its hiring in Asia as the duo rush to expand in the continent.

We wrote before about how OpenAI is diving into the opportunities in Southeast Asia, working closely with the government and public sectors in Singapore and opening a startup accelerator programme alongside the Thai government. Anthropic has taken a different approach by focusing on the more mature market opportunities in South Korea and Japan, but it is now increasing its efforts in India and Singapore, Rest of World reports. It is poaching from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon in proof of what is a new tech world order in Asia.

The playbook is very much classic US corporate tech, with a focus on public policy and other relationship building roles, as well as sales. OpenAI is diving into the experimental potential, through its work with the Singapore government with training opportunities and public-private partnerships, not to mention the Thailand programme, which is something it hasn’t tried anywhere else in the world.

Deals

Bengaluru-based Swish raised $24 million to expand its own kitchen and delivery network to compete with 10-minute food-delivery services [Economic Times]

US belt and road? The Trump administration will lend nearly $100 million to Africell, Africa’s only American-owned telecom operator, to deploy mobile-network equipment from US and allied suppliers [Reuters]

Markets

Tencent-backed Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged 206% in its Shanghai debut after its retail offering drew orders for more than 6,000 times the shares available [CNBC]

Chinese AI developer Z.ai is raising about $5 billion through a Hong Kong share placement and convertible bond sale [Reuters]

AI and Chips

We recently critiqued Moonshot AI’s $50 billion valuation with $300 million ARR but now Bloomberg reported that figure has jumped to over $1 billion as of August. A very timely leak as the company plots an IPO [Bloomberg]

We also know Chinese AI firms need to make money, so here’s Bloomberg again looking at how China’s AI sector is moving from competing on large models to commercialising AI agents [Bloomberg]

Newly-public Unitree Robotics grew humanoid-robot revenue eightfold to $129 million in 2025 [Ars Technica]

Flipkart’s Super.money is rolling out AI agents to its 20 million users to shop on Flipkart and buy gold at user-set prices [Bloomberg]

Policy

South Korea expanded its espionage laws to cover theft of sensitive economic and technology information, including chip secrets, with those acting for foreign countries now facing up to 30 years in prison [FT]

China set a 2030 target for large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles on highways, urban expressways and selected city roads [Reuters]

The European Commission is preparing legislation to close enforcement gaps that let illegal goods sold on e-commerce platforms reach EU consumers [Euronews]

In other news:

Tokyo startup MW plans to sell its first robot-equipped home by 2028, embedding robotic arms in ceilings and walls rather than building humanoids [Bloomberg]

A misconfigured database exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew records, including passport numbers and flight details, from travellers flying to, from or through Vietnam between January 2017 and April 2026 [Bleeping Computer]

Amazon Pay India is considering travel insurance and other products to push beyond payments after initially launching health insurance [Reuters]

Hugging Face, OpenRouter, these two AI infrastructure platforms were just sold in deals that combined reach nearly $20 billion. Now Asia is seeing its own versions rising with UniPat, a startup created by a former Alibaba AI employee, linked with raising $300 million led by Alibaba itself. It may be Friday, but today’s newsletter is packed with deals across AI, a Grab rumour and more.

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Alibaba is getting into the AI infrastructure game with a former intern

Deals around AI infrastructure are a major focus right now. Following Stripe’s $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter and Nvidia’s $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face, Alibaba is making its own play. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese firm will lead a $300 million investment in training and benchmarking platform UniPat at a $2.5 billion valuation.

UniPat CEO Li Kuan is a former intern at Alibaba’s Tongyi AI division so there are already plenty of links between the two companies. But, more broadly, it’s clear that focus has moved into the infrastructure and platforms that underpin how AI is measured and trained.

Hugging Face and OpenRouter are very much along these lines. Both operate as central points through which users can easily switch between hundreds of AI models in an instant and with the same account and credit balance. Since they are repositories for the world’s top AI models, they generate vast attention and traffic which also makes them valuable.

UniPat isn’t exactly the same, but there are plenty of similarities, as Bloomberg explains:

Founded in late 2025, UniPat hosts benchmarks evaluating AI coding agents on software engineering tasks, browser agents executing everyday web actions, and frontier multimodal models on visual reasoning problems. Li’s research lab — with backing from Monolith and ByteDance Ltd.-backed Jinqiu Fund — also builds its own smaller models for purposes like prediction and scientific research.

Aside from a reliable read on the power of AI models, UniPat is also providing human-generated internet data, a resource that many companies training models are desperately seeking and struggling to find.

Alibaba has its highly-regarded Qwen open weight model, and it has invested significantly in bringing AI into its core business and enterprise customers as we’ve noted a number of times this year. There’s no doubt this platform is already useful to the company, but it makes sense that it would be even more interesting as Alibaba looks to extend its reach and touchpoints with potential customers and the wider community of AI users.

Alongside Alibaba, the speculated investors include Tencent and HSG, HongShan Group aka Sequoia China.

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Indonesia’s Zankore secures $3.1 billion to build out Nvidia-powered AI data centre

On a related AI note, we don’t often see major companies coming out of Southeast Asia but Indonesia-based AI infrastructure platform Zankore, which is backed by Nvidia, just secured a $3.1 billion loan to purchase advanced chips.

That deal is one of the largest financings for a company of this type in Asia.

The money will go towards buying and deploying Nvidia GPUs (this is why Nvidia backs these companies) for a new AI factory that is planned to reach 1 gigawatt in capacity. Aside from Nvidia, Zankore is backed by Nokia, telco Indosat and its parent company Ooredoo.

We’ve written about the challenges of making sovereign AI, i.e. AI systems that are not reliant on international companies and products, a reality in Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia. A compromise of sorts looks to be having local infrastructure like Zankore as the data centre layer. That is just one part, of course, and the lack of local AI models remains an issue.

Grab eyes BNPL as the next leg of its fintech growth story

We know Grab is doubling down on its financial services business, as it finally bids to turn its fintech potential into clear growth, and now there’s a hint at what further direction that might take. Bloomberg reported that the ride-hailing firm is in talks to take a majority ownership stake in Atome Financial, the Singapore-headquartered buy-now-pay-later platform, in a deal that would value it at upwards of $2 billion.

Grab has more than $5 billion in cash to spend and, as we’ve said repeatedly, it will use that for strategic M&A. It made a series of investments in autonomous vehicle tech last year, acquired US-based investment platform Stash and it is moving into a new market with the $600 million purchase of Foodpanda Taiwan. Adding BNPL would complement its existing payments and lending push.

Disclosure: Atome is an Ellerton & Co. client. This item is based on Bloomberg reporting.

Deals

We ran out of space to analyse this fascinating deal, but TikTok will invest $980 million in a 50-year logistics project in Ho Chi Minh City, with its Tokgistic unit initially contributing $196 million before operations begin in November [TechNode]

Uber invested $10 million in Indian fleet-management startup Carrum Mobility at a $168 million valuation, up from $63 million when the US firm made an investment in January [TechCrunch]

Bengaluru-based QNu Labs raised Rs 200 crore ($21 million) in a round led by India’s National Quantum Mission and Speciale Invest, taking its total funding to Rs 375 crore ($39 million) as it develops quantum-safe cybersecurity [Economic Times]

South Korean AI startup Upstage is considering a pre-IPO funding round as it seeks capital for its hardware-intensive AI push, after raising 560 billion won ($420 million) in its Series C this year [Bloomberg]

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala invested in China’s Luckin Coffee as part of a $1 billion transaction with controlling shareholder Centurium Capital [FT]

Markets

Chinese regulators are tightening approval standards for humanoid-robot IPOs after Unitree Robotics’ volatile debut, requiring startups to show recurring revenue, narrowing losses or genuine technological innovation [The Information]

Investors are paying steep fees for access to special-purpose vehicles holding DeepSeek stakes, pushing the Chinese AI lab’s implied valuation to about $71 billion from $52 billion a month earlier despite five-year lock-ups and no voting rights [FT]

Moonshot AI is considering a Hong Kong IPO followed by a Shanghai Star Market listing as the Kimi maker looks to raise capital and broaden its investor base [SCMP]

AI and Chips

The US (has again) accused six Chinese AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba of using distillation to copy American models [Reuters]

In more detail: Anthropic itself directly accused Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Xiaomi and Moonshot of using Claude conversations to train their own models [Anthropic]

DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash, a 552-billion-parameter model that it says is faster and cheaper to run than its previous flagship [SCMP]

Samsung Electronics opened a 6,600-square-metre advanced-chip-packaging research centre in Yokohama [Nikkei Asia]

Malaysia faces a 9-gigawatt gas-fired power shortfall by 2032 as data centres consume more electricity, with their share of demand reaching a record 9.3% in August [Reuters]

Underemployed Chinese lawyers, architects and engineers are said to be taking low-paid gig work training AI models in specialist fields as the country’s weak economy squeezes incomes [Rest of World]

China’s AI chipmakers, including Huawei and Cambricon, are raising prices as high-bandwidth-memory costs rise, with Huawei’s Ascend 950DT accelerator now quoted at more than 250,000 yuan ($37,255) [Reuters]

Crypto

Citigroup plans to offer Japanese companies instant overseas remittances using blockchain-based tokenised deposits as early as this year, including transfers outside banking hours [Nikkei Asia]

Singaporean Malone Lam pleaded guilty in the US to helping steal and launder $245 million in Bitcoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts on record [BBC]

India plans to push BRICS members to use central bank digital currencies for cross-border trade settlements while opposing a bloc-wide payments network that could challenge the dollar [Bloomberg]

Policy

Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward plans to ban Airbnb-style short-term rentals in residential areas and near schools and cultural sites as complaints about tourist behaviour fuel a backlash against overtourism [The Guardian]

India’s Serious Fraud Office recommended an investigation into Xiaomi over alleged irregularities in its business model and compliance with foreign-investment laws [Reuters]

The US Treasury sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language Telegram marketplace accused of facilitating cyber scams, money laundering and human trafficking, and seized $52.8 million from 52 crypto wallets [The Record]

In other news:

Flipkart and Amazon are expanding into quick commerce, streaming video, microdramas and food delivery as their combined share of India’s monthly active users fell from 67% in 2022 to 53% in August [Economic Times]

Indeed, Flipkart launched a standalone app for its Minutes quick-commerce service and began piloting food delivery in Bengaluru ahead of October’s Big Billion Days sale [Economic Times]

At least four cyber-espionage groups, most linked to Chinese state intelligence, have exploited a previously unknown Chrome vulnerability since late August, targeting US defence contractors, NGOs and Southeast Asian governments [The Record]

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa are developing common standards to verify AI agents that can make purchases for users, creating a framework that payment networks and platforms can use to recognise trusted agents [Reuters]

Southeast Asia just got a major acquisition as Singapore’s Tazapay got scooped up by stablecoin giant Circle in a $400 million deal. But the most interesting part of the company is that it is a global business not simply one from Southeast Asia, as we explore today.

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Tazapay’s move into crypto pays off handsomely

Asia has another stablecoin exit after US-listed Circle announced it will buy Singapore-based Tazapay in an all-stock deal worth $400 million. The price itself wasn’t announced, but it is mentioned in a filing—god bless public company reporting…

Circle and Tazapay are well acquainted as Circle Ventures took part in the startup’s Series B round one year ago, before leading a $36 million extension in March of this year. Tazapay raised more than $60 million in total and beyond early backers like Peak XV and Saison Capital, it also counts crypto firms Ripple and Coinbase’s VC arm on its cap table.

This deal comes just months after Payward, the parent of US crypto exchange Kraken, agreed to buy Hong Kong-headquartered stablecoin platform Reap for $600 million. While Reap helps companies bring stablecoins into their financing and operations, Tazapay comes from the opposite direction. Its payment rails handle cross-border transactions and in recent years it has added stablecoins.

Six-year-old Tazapay started out as a pure payments play. That’s unsurprisingly given CEO Rahul Shinghal is a 10-year veteran of PayPal and previously led Stripe’s revenue and growth in APAC, but that focus changed in recent years.

Tazapay became a Circle partner in 2025, enabling payments in Circle’s USDC stablecoin, and it added those aforementioned crypto investors as backers around the same time. That appears to have been transformative. Today, around 60% of its $25 billion of annualised payment volume comes from stablecoins, according to the press release announcing the deal. That’s more than double the $10 billion volume it disclosed when it announced its Series B in August 2025.

This deal ranks among the largest exits for a Southeast Asian startup (it is notably Circle’s first acquisition since its NYSE IPO in 2025), but Tazapay’s real strength and appeal is that it has built a global business that goes well beyond its home region. It claims to have more than 60 banking and fintech partners, and local payout rails that span 100-plus markets, a licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and registrations with FINTRAC in Canada, AUSTRAC in Australia, and FinCEN in the United States.

This is exactly why Circle is splashing the cash (stock) to bring the business in-house. Buying Tazapay instantly gives it payment rails for USDC that it can grow immediately to help its stablecoin adoption expand beyond the typical crypto market and user base.

“Over time we expect this [acquisition] to mean more routes, wider coverage, and the ability to move money in more corridors and outside local banking hours. When those are available, we will share the news,” Shinghal wrote in a blog post for Tazapay.

So the deal isn’t selling Southeast Asian startups per se, but it is an endorsement for why Singapore is an ideal location to build a global fintech service that can be acquired by the world’s biggest companies.

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Paytm launches enterprise AI business

AI agents are everywhere, with even Meta launching its own today, and India’s Paytm is zoning in after it launched a dedicated enterprise business called Paytm Intelligence, or Pi. Nice alias, and the business could do decently too. Bloomberg reports that the focus is on offering AI agents for financial institutions in India and the UAE, so AI agents for sales, customer service, operations and more.

Paytm is getting back to its roots here. The company first emerged as a services business long before fintech was a thing, and upselling agentic AI is a wholly logical play given the connections it has. Barely a day goes by without a new enterprise AI business emerging, Anthropic has its own such is the opportunity. Enterprise sales are about relationships, trust and connections which Paytm should tap into here.

After losing its payment bank arm in 2024, Paytm has gone after value added services and earlier this year it forecast stronger annual revenue growth.

Deals

Indian satellite-imaging startup Pixxel raised $100 million in a round co-led by Temasek and Seraphim Space, valuing it at an estimated $400 million to $450 million [Economic Times]

Samsung led a €3 billion ($3.48 billion) investment round in French AI startup Mistral AI at a valuation of more than $24 billion [WSJ]

Singapore’s Circles Group is spinning off its telecom-operator software business and could raise several hundred million dollars from a strategic or financial investor [Bloomberg]

Markets

In an effort to boost its IPO pipeline, Thailand’s stock exchange will lower the minimum market capitalisation for new-economy listings, including electronics and robotics, to 5 billion baht ($151.9 million) from 7.5 billion baht ($227.9 million) [Nikkei Asia]

Chinese memory-chip maker Longsys raised HK$7.08 billion ($903 million) in its Hong Kong IPO, but opened flat after pricing the shares at a 44% discount to its Shenzhen-listed stock [Bloomberg]

AI

OpenAI signed a multiyear deal with Australian firm Firmus for capacity at two Malaysian data centres [Reuters]

The Philippines unveiled a seven-year $34.4 billion plan to lift AI data-centre capacity from 50 MW to 1.5 GW, with $21 billion expected from private investors [Nikkei Asia]

ByteDance is developing a real-time spatial video-generation model that could be used in robotics and autonomous systems, with founder Zhang Yiming personally overseeing a potential launch next month [Bloomberg]

China is pushing computing capacity into its north and northwest, with Inner Mongolia’s Ulanqab emerging as a data-centre hub and more than half the national pipeline now outside the crowded east [Bloomberg]

DeepSeek plans to hire about 150 senior backend engineers to rebuild systems strained by its rapid user growth and compute-heavy AI agents [SCMP]

Moonshot AI, MiniMax and other Chinese AI firms are selling subscriptions through Alibaba’s new Tmall AI Space Station in a new way to find consumers [SCMP]

Researchers used advanced AI models to build a computer worm that can hijack WeChat accounts and spread across iOS and Android devices without victims opening a link or message [NYT]

Chips

Malaysia is considering Huawei chips for a 2 billion ringgit ($494 million) sovereign AI project [Bloomberg]

Huawei says its new Kirin 9050 Pro delivers 42% higher performance through its LogicFolding architecture, testing whether it can boost chip performance without lithography equipment blocked by US sanctions [SCMP]

Huawei is backing Chinese suppliers developing semiconductor equipment and components, including an advanced DUV lithography machine being tested by SMIC and Huawei [FT]

China aims to build AI computing clusters of up to 100,000 accelerator cards and targets 9,800 exaflops of capacity by 2030, alongside 3.8 trillion yuan ($532 billion) of information-infrastructure investment [SCMP]

TSMC plans to adopt ASML’s high-NA EUV lithography machines in 2030, following Samsung’s 2028 target and Intel’s earlier production plans as chipmakers race for more powerful AI processors [Nikkei Asia]

Policy

Huawei has gone on trial in Brooklyn over US accusations that it stole trade secrets and confidential information from competitors while building its global business [FT]

Belgian prosecutors detained a Chinese-Belgian former chip executive on suspicion of spying for China in a case involving gallium nitride semiconductors [Reuters]

Chinese export controls on indium are creating a supply risk for semiconductor makers, whose high-speed data-transmission products depend on indium phosphide substrates [Bloomberg]

In other news:

India’s China Plus One gains remain concentrated in a handful of sectors and regions despite booming iPhone production, limiting the broader employment impact of its manufacturing push [India Dispatch]

Logitech turned China into its fastest-growing market by building a dedicated local operation that designs and markets products for Chinese consumers before taking successful ideas global [Semafor]

Japan’s Terra Drone is developing autonomous interceptor drones designed to destroy low-cost attack drones without using multimillion-dollar missiles [WSJ]

Southeast Asia’s content-commerce GMV is expected to reach $77.9 billion in 2026, up from $49.7 billion last year as live and short-video shopping become core ecommerce channels [TechNode]

South Korean battery-materials maker EcoPro is developing high-nickel cathodes and solid-state batteries for humanoid robots, with commercial production of its sulphide-based solid electrolytes planned for next year [Bloomberg]

China is about to get its first heavyweight AI IPO validation as Moonshot, the maker of Kimi, lines up a listing for a valuation of at least $50 billion that could raise as much as $5 billion. We’ve seen crazy memestock growth from Zhipu this year, but now Chinese AI firms will need to justify their high valuations and show real revenue growth. That will take time.

Finally, I started a new role last week with PR firm Ellerton. I updated my disclaimer, but the focus of this newsletter will continue as it did when I worked in media, venture capital and consulting. Do get in touch if you need great communications support!

Moonshot brings a new era for Chinese AI IPOs

Hot on the heels of the first earnings reports from Zhipu and MiniMax, China’s first listed AI companies, comes the news that they’ll soon be joined by Moonshot AI. The company behind the Kimi models has confidentially filed for its Hong Kong IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Beijing-based Moonshot was last valued at $50 billion, and that’s said to be the target for its IPO which could raise between $3 billion and $5 billion. These numbers would make it comfortably Hong Kong’s largest listing this year.

The figures are achievable. Zhipu (which runs Z.ai) is trading at a market cap of just over $63 billion with its share price up more than 7X this year to date. But Moonshot is coming into a market that isn’t just going up and up. There’s a more realistic feeling and that’s reflected in valuation.

Early backers of Zhipu have logged incredible returns, but the stock has lost more than half its value since the second half of June. Zhipu, meanwhile, is up just 5% in 2026, it currently trades at a $16 billion valuation which is nearly three-quarters down on its March 2026 highs.

The difference has always been that Moonshot wasn’t in a rush to go public. When it raised a $500 million Series C in January, it had more capital on hand than both Zhipu and MiniMax. They rang the IPO bell out of necessity, as their cash in the bank was dwindling. But Moonshot went on to raise a further $3.5 billion in July to further strengthen its balance sheet.

At the turn of the year, Moonshot was valued at a mere $4.3 billion and now it has pulled in at least $8 billion from its backers at a much higher valuation. That’s a very different proposition for public markets. Those two early AI IPOs were a real test of the waters. Nearly nine months later and Chinese AI models have gained recognition and respect, with Moonshot’s Kimi particularly becoming a known brand in global tech circles thanks to impressive releases.

Reputation of models is one of the clear gaps between Zhipu and MiniMax, thanks to its GLM model which has won plaudits outside of China in a similar way to Kimi. Zhipu has also changed its business mode to focus on cloud-based services that can reach a global audience. That wasn’t the case at the start of the year when it listed.

We don’t know what Moonshot’s financials look like, other than the company recently crossed $300 million annual recurring revenue. That’s not substantially more than Zhipu and MiniMax, which did $136 million and $117 million respectively in the first half of the year. It remains to be seen how Moonshot will justify a much higher listing price. Potentially, it has grander plans given its cash position and the stage of its business development outside of China, but I’d imagine it isn’t that different to where Zhipu is right now.

Still, this is a new phase for Chinese AI IPOs. With DeepSeek, which is valued at over $70 billion, also preparing to go public over the next twelve months, Hong Kong retail investors are going to get exposure to more mature and crucially more expensive stocks.

That will bring raised expectations. To hit higher valuations, investors are going to want to see a real jump in revenue compared to what they see right now from other Chinese AI firms. Particularly with US duo Anthropic and OpenAI headed to public markets. If Moonshot lists at $50 billion, what will it take for its valuation to appreciate significantly enough for investors to see returns? Given the fierce competition and tough pricing conditions, I don’t know whether that’s realistic at this point.

India Quotient is learning the importance of realised exits

A fund’s returns are only as good as realised profit, as one fund in India is finding out.

Quotient struck gold when it backed ShareChat, a domestic-focused social networking platform in India, with the deal generating a 77X gain on paper. That put the fund on the map and helped generate dealflow and business as a fund backing local winners at a time when numerous Chinese services were banned and Western tech imports faced pressure, as Newcomer explains:

After that spectacular launch on the back of ShareChat, India Quotient went on to raise five funds totaling $320 million. Despite being small by modern VC standards, it has developed a reputation of spotting contrarian themes that proved profitable.

However, ShareChat has undergone layoffs, down rounds and there’s been no big exit yet. That will impact Quotient’s second and potentially third fund, and overall its reputation as an investor. It’s an issue that impacts all funds, but this is a particularly acute example. Newcomer’s post is paywalled but even the preview gives a gist of a topic that is equally as applicable in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets.

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Deals

ByteDance secured a $29.6 billion loan, bigger than the $20 billion it first sought, giving the TikTok owner more balance-sheet firepower as it keeps pouring money into AI [Bloomberg]

Indian spacetech startup Astrobase is said to be in talks to raise $40-$50 million in a round led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at about $250-$300 million [Economic Times]

Indian fintech Slice raised $100 million at a valuation of about $450 million, a steep reset from its $1.4 billion peak [Moneycontrol]

India-based smart-ring maker Ultrahuman raised $70 million from investors including Qualcomm Ventures at a $365 million valuation [Entrackr]

Gaming giant Krafton plans to invest another $250 million in India over the next 3-4 years to take its total commitment past $500 million and into AI, robotics and deep tech [TechCrunch]

Markets

Philippines fintech Mynt got the greenlight for its IPO to raise $1.5 billion, becoming the first local company to use the regulator’s lower public-float rule for large issuers [DealStreetAsia]

A study shows China’s tech-sufficiency push has seen the number of IPOs on Shanghai’s Star Market this year that target technology bottlenecks has risen from 8.1% in 2022 to 20% [SCMP]

South Korea’s semiconductor exports surged 209% year-on-year to a record $46.65 billion in August, or nearly half of the country’s goods exports [CNBC]

Vietnamese electric taxi operator Green SM plans to expand into the US and Europe ahead of a targeted 2028 Hong Kong IPO [Reuters]

Shein shares fell as much as 10% on their third day of Hong Kong trading, extending the firm’s weak debut [FT]

AI and Chips

Despite being blacklisted by Washington over national security concerns, China’s Inspur has reportedly continued to gain access to some of the most advanced US AI chips through a Silicon Valley subsidiary that appears to exploit gaps in export controls [NYT]

China remains about 15 years behind in cutting-edge chipmaking equipment, according to Zeiss executive Frank Rohmund [Bloomberg]

KEPCO, South Korea’s largest utility provider, proposed that Samsung Electronics pay 20 trillion won ($15 billion) upfront for power through 2031 and SK Hynix pay 5 trillion won ($3.8 billion) [Reuters]

Meanwhile, Korea plans to merge five public power companies under KEPCO in October 2027 to accelerate investment as AI and chipmaking drive electricity demand [Nikkei Asia]

ByteDance is reportedly in preliminary talks with data-centre operators to add 5-6 gigawatts of computing capacity in Inner Mongolia over the next two years [SCMP]

ASML Japan plans to increase its workforce from 500 to 700 people by 2030 to expand support for advanced chip production from local clients [Nikkei Asia]

DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI chips at a new Inner Mongolia data centre [Bloomberg]

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are expected to add about 600,000 wafers a month to South Korea’s memory-chip capacity by 2028, while China’s CXMT is also forecast to double capacity to 600,000 wafers a month [Bloomberg]

Japan’s AI data-centre capacity is set to more than quadruple from 1.1 GW in 2025 to 4.9 GW by 2033 [Nikkei Asia]

Tata Consultancy Services and HyperVault committed 700 billion rupees ($7.4 billion) to a 1-gigawatt AI data-centre campus in Hyderabad, one of India’s largest AI infrastructure bets [Bloomberg]

Crypto

Singapore’s central bank proposed legislative changes for stablecoin issuers, moving its regulatory framework closer to launch while planning to ban interest payments and require stress tests and wind-down plans [PYMNTS]

Policy

A year after India banned real-money gaming, offshore betting platforms are still pulling in users and money while the Enforcement Directorate widens a money-laundering probe linked to Parimatch [Economic Times]

India has stalled Alipay+’s proposed link with UPI for cross-border payments over concerns about Chinese ownership, data security and storage/usage of customer information [Reuters]

The Trump administration imposed tariffs of up to 100% on drones, targeting China’s dominance in the market while trying to push more production into the US [NYT]

South Korea’s labour ministry ruled that profit-linked employee bonuses are not subject to mandatory collective bargaining [Nikkei Asia]

Vietnam plans to make parents register and supervise social-media accounts for children under 16, and bar under-13s from posting, commenting or sharing content [TechNode Global]

The US and China will hold their first official bilateral talks focused solely on AI in mid-September, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leading the US delegation [Reuters]

Thailand suspended construction of 49 data centres while it drafts new rules for the power-hungry facilities, with regulations expected within a month as local resource concerns grow [Straits Times]

In other news:

India’s cycle-rickshaws are rapidly giving way to electric models as registered e-rickshaws surge from 78,700 in 2021 to 1.8 million [Bloomberg]

Uber is cutting 200 to 250 jobs in India as part of a global restructuring that will eliminate about 3,300 roles [Economic Times]

PayPal will cut about 220 jobs in India as part of the broader multiyear turnaround plan [Reuters]

A Chinese state-linked hacking group compromised executive laptops at an agricultural conference in Hainan by physically entering hotel rooms and booting the machines from USB drives, bypassing the usual phishing and network-intrusion routes [VentureBeat]

Amazon Prime Video will more than double its investment in original Japanese content over the next two years [Nikkei Asia]

Luckin Coffee is expanding quickly in New York City five years after a fraud scandal nearly derailed the company [FT]

Chinese companies are experimenting with ways to package AI usage tokens for consumers, including credit-card rewards and telecom bundles tied to services such as DeepSeek [Rest of World]

When Zhipu, aka Z.ai, and MiniMax went public back in January it was notable that neither made much money at all. Fast forward to their first earnings reports, and revenue growth has blown up thanks to a focus on selling direct to consumers right across the world. Few saw that coming, and the next six months will also be telling as the duo’s business models develop further. What’s for sure is R&D and other spending will continue to accelerate, too.

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China’s AI startups find growth but costs spiral

China’s AI pioneers are growing up with surging revenue, but at a cost. That’s the verdict from the first earnings reports for Zhipu (Z.ai) and MiniMax, the companies that went public in the world’s first AI IPOs back in January.

Zhipu has been the more impressive of the two with revenue growing by nearly 400% year-on-year to reach $136 million during the last six months. When I say the companies grew up, Zhipu is the perfect example as it switched its core money-making focus from on-premise deployment to cloud-based products.

That’s reflected in its GLM AI models, which have gained traction in recent months in particular for offering a quality experience at a fraction of the cost of Anthropic, OpenAI and others. Cloud-based revenue went from just 15% of revenue one year ago to 86.5% today. On-premise revenue actually fell as the focus on launching global products that anyone in the world can use, and crucially pay for.

It’s a similar story for MiniMax, which grew its platform and enterprise service revenue by over 700%. Those sales cover its LLM, music AI product and consumer apps around video and image generation, and they went from one-third of all MiniMax sales to nearly two-thirds.

Overall, MiniMax logged an impressive 283% annual revenue jump, coming in at $116.6 million for the last six months, slightly behind Zhipu. January, when we wrote that neither company makes much money at all, seems a long time ago.

The rapid development of AI models this year has allowed Chinese companies to reach global audiences for the first time, in a way that wasn’t possible before. Sure, Tencent launched games that had been hits outside of China and Alibaba had success with e-commerce in parts of Europe, but that’s about the extent of it. Even ByteDance had to alter its core product to find success overseas.

Zhipu and MiniMax, though, offer the same product locally and internationally. Plus, unlike the successes of TikTok, Temu or Shein, international uptake has taken months not years and much less lobbying and localisation. They haven’t reached consumer tech scale, for sure, but there seems to be plenty of growth potential remaining.

This progress, however, has come at a cost. Playing on a global stage means a big increase in spending to keep its products competitive.

MiniMax’s adjusted net loss more than doubled, from $138.7 million to $293.0 million as admin costs like staffing doubled and R&D spending surged 139%. Zhipu’s R&D bill rose a more modest 34% but its cost of revenue ballooned 635%. The narrowed its net loss to $296 million, from a $336.8 million loss a year earlier, but it remains deeply in the red.

Neither company provided financial guidance or forecasts, they instead focused on product development with a focus on enterprise/API growth, building more agentic capabilities and, of course, continued investment in models.

You’d expect that their next results bring more of the same. Spending will increase but revenue should increase at a more rapid rate, given the progress that both have made selling across hundreds of countries worldwide. It will also depend on what trends run through the industry, agentic AI wasn’t as established in January as it is today, for example.

Zhipu and MiniMax will be the first of many public AI companies. Chinese rivals Moonshot, DeepSeek and even Manus have been linked with IPOs in the coming year or so. Plus, in the US, Anthropic and OpenAI have completed initial applications to list, too.

More public companies mean more data, more potential to scrutinise growth and company development, etc. But already, these two firms are producing very unique financial results the likes of which haven’t been seen before.

Markets

Yotta Data Services plans to go public by March 2027 to raise as much as $1.5 billion to fund its AI infrastructure expansion, which includes sovereign cloud products for India. The company recently raised $150 million at a valuation of $3.9 billion. [Reuters]

Deals

Adobe acquired India-based marketing intelligence startup Rilo, bringing in the team’s technology to automate marketing workflows and help brands track their visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude [TechCrunch]

Beijing-based Tripo AI, which develops 3D-native AI models, raised about $445 million in a Series B round [FinSMEs]

AI and Chips

Kioxia’s chip plant is reshaping Kitakami in rural Japan as it adds a third facility with government backing, though the benefits have been uneven as local businesses compete with the company for workers [Bloomberg]

Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor is investing $2 billion in a new 12-inch fab in Wuxi, adding 55,000 wafers a month as China expands capacity for AI infrastructure and cuts reliance on foreign technology [SCMP]

Policy

Taiwan has intensified its crackdown on Chinese companies accused of concealing their links while recruiting chip talent and seeking sensitive technology, with previously unpublished data showing the scale of its investigations [Rest of World]

China has removed more than 5.61 million pieces of content and 49,000 accounts in a crackdown on AI-generated “slop” across platforms including Douyin, Kuaishou, RedNote and WeChat [SCMP]

In other news:

Reliance Jio is expanding JioPC beyond its broadband subscribers, allowing any Indian internet user to access a cloud-based virtual PC on an existing computer and gain the capabilities to run AI applications [TechCrunch]

JioHotstar is replacing Hotstar in the UK, Canada and Singapore in its first expansion beyond India [TechCrunch]

China-based hackers compromised Cisco routers to monitor organisations, steal credentials and enter other networks, using a campaign dubbed Fire Ant to exploit trusted infrastructure and evade detection [The Record]

Kazakhstan’s Kaspi.kz is expanding its Turkish offering through Hepsiburada, adding shopping loans now and more fintech services next year as it looks to replicate its e-commerce and financial-services model [Nikkei Asia]

Walmart-owned Flipkart is bringing short-form scripted shows to its e-commerce app as it pushes further into content-to-commerce, with Terribly Tiny Tales and Pratilipi among its production partners [Economic Times]

Today we look at how time hasn’t been kind to some of Covid’s hottest businesses. Shein is rebuilding its fast fashion business model out in the open, after it went public in Hong Kong this week in a rush. In India, two of the country’s once-fast-growing online learning startups joined forces to plot their own journey to IPO.

A quick mention for Culpium, which has moved to paid subscriptions. Long-time ATR friend Tim Culpan is one of Asia’s longest-serving and most thorough tech journalists. His newsletter will make you smarter.

To keep up with our issues, follow us on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. Please do share Asia Tech Review with people you know who want to get smart about Asia tech.

Shein is rebuilding its business in public

The time to go public is not when things are up in the air, but no matter for Shein. The Chinese fast fashion company rang the bell when it listed in Hong Kong in an IPO that raised $1.74 billion and valued the business at just under $27 billion.

This was anything but a convincing debut from the company, which was once valued as high as $100 billion. There was no pop as we’ve seen with memory maker CXMT or robotics firm Unitree. Instead, Shein’s shares are trading slightly up after recovering from an initial 10% drop.

The company was the hottest property in tech just a few years ago, and an early example of how Chinese companies could go global with real impact and results. But this IPO rush tells a story of mistakes and misfortune when Shein was riding high.

The listing looks rushed, and it is. In going public, Shein has removed a $4.4 billion cash obligation to early investors that it would have faced had it not IPO’d this year. In recent years, the company had tried unsuccessfully to list in the US and then UK, but just came in before the deadline.

The company has plenty of cash on hand, more than $14 billion for that matter, but handing more than a quarter of it in redemptions wouldn’t exactly be prudent.

Typically, companies go public when they’ve long figured out their product-market fit, growth and financials, but Shein is in a unique situation of still needing to turn things around. All while it is a newly publicly traded business.

It tried for years to shed its Chinese tag, playing up its headquarters in Singapore after relocating in 2021 and splashing cash to sponsor lifestyle events, gigs and more in the US and other Western markets. But since pinning its hopes on a Hong Kong IPO, it has embraced its roots in China and even its reclusive founder, Sky Xu, has made more appearances and been quoted more than before.

Beyond the change of narrative, Shein is also shifting its business model from simply being a provider to being an enabler. It made its name as a cheap supplier of fashion items, but post pandemic consumption habits changed and the import tax loopholes it took advantage of in the US and Europe were sealed.

Bloomberg reports that executives describe this new ambition as becoming the “Amazon Web Services of the fashion industry.”

“The AWS for X” is a tortuous simile you hear across many parts of the tech industry, and in this case it appears to mean that Shein will open its supply chain and operations to fashion brands to source from China. An in-house example is coming with Everlane, the US fashion brand that Shein acquired for a discounted price of around $100 million.

The deal is being probed by the US government but, assuming it is cleared, Everlane would tap into Shein’s network of more than 7,500 designers, manufacturers and merchants to streamline its supply chain operation and lower its costs. Shein has more than 20 brands of its own so it has plenty to work on.

We’ve seen ‘China manufacturing via API’ businesses emerge before, and fail, but none have the scale, cash or ambition of Shein which means this shouldn’t be dismissed. But, a change this significant is made even tougher when it’s done as a public-facing business.

It isn’t unprecedented. PDD, which operates Shein rival Temu, built its fast fashion and goods business after it went public. Sea has grown its Shopee business since being listed. But this uncertainty explains why the market is taking a step back from Shein stock.

There are lessons here in how capital is raised, not to mention the complicated and ever-evolving tensions between the US and China. Now, at least, our analysis of Shein’s business can be firmly rooted in its numbers. There will be nowhere to hide.

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Two faded Covid unicorns join forces in India in $200M acquisition

During Covid times, online learning startups were among the hottest properties in India. The hype faded significantly since then but there are still some category winners. A major piece of consolidation has made that even clearer after UpGrad completed the acquisition of rival Unacademy in a $200 million all-stock deal.

That price would have been unthinkable back in pandemic times, when Unacademy was worth upwards of $3 billion. Both companies raised close to $1 billion from investors, with UpGrad’s valuation reaching a (slightly lower) peak of around $2.2 billion.

The deal was announced in March, but it took some time to get over the line. TechCrunch reports that Unacademy angel investors are cashing out following the completion. Early backers will still have done well, but the likes of SoftBank, Tiger Global, General Atlantic who came in later will be hoping that UpGrad can come good on their bet on online education in India.

Its Airlearn language learning app is showing progress and the newly acquired business isn’t burning cash as it did before. Combined, the two businesses are at north of $250 million annual revenue, with TechCrunch providing more details:

The deal comes despite Unacademy having about ₹9 billion (about $94.8 million) in the bank and annual revenue of roughly ₹4 billion (around $42.13 million), Munjal wrote. He said most of the startup’s businesses were profitable or close to profitability, and said the company had the option to continue operating independently.

Things could, of course, be worse. Take the example of Byju’s, which has effectively become worthless and dogged by lawsuits and court action between investors and its founder.

UpGrad’s goal is to reach an IPO, and combining the forces of these two is the best bet to get there.

Deals

Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwan’s MediaTek through convertible bonds, deepening a partnership aimed at expanding its data-centre chip ecosystem [Bloomberg]

500 Global is reportedly shelving dedicated Southeast Asia funds, meaning future regional bets are likely to come from its global vehicles as the venture market keeps consolidating [DealStreetAsia]

Bengaluru-based Alteon raised $2.5 million to build autonomous aircraft that can stay airborne for more than a year by harvesting ocean winds [TechCrunch]

Magna International is investing another $35 million in Bengaluru-based battery swapping startup Yuma Energy, raising its stake above 51% [TechCrunch]

Markets

Hong Kong’s IPO market has taken off around Chinese company listings. There’s been a lot of speculation that Southeast Asian companies are looking at it for their own IPOs, we’ll get a little taste (pun intended) if and when Jollibee picks Hong Kong for a listing of its overseas assets. Obviously not tech, but might start to clear a pathway [Nikkei Asia]

Chinese memory-chipmaker Longsys is seeking to raise up to HK$6.28 billion ($801 million) in a Hong Kong IPO, extending the rush of AI supply-chain companies tapping public markets [Bloomberg]

SB Energy, the SoftBank-backed AI infrastructure platform, filed for a Nasdaq IPO as it prepares for a listing that could raise $5 billion to $7 billion [WSJ]

Related: OpenAI received warrants worth an estimated $5.5 billion in SB Energy as part of a deal to become a data-centre tenant, tying the ChatGPT maker more closely to SoftBank’s power-infrastructure ambitions [WSJ]

Shanghai-based Enflame Technology, backed by Tencent, is seeking to raise about 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) in a STAR Market IPO, making it the last of China’s “four little dragons” of AI chipmakers to go public [Bloomberg]

Earnings

Broadly, China’s AI chipmakers are starting to benefit from Beijing’s self-reliance push, but first-half results show a widening gap between profitable leaders and loss-making rivals [SCMP]

In particular, Z.AI’s first-half revenue rose to 954 million yuan ($142 million), missing analyst estimates as China’s AI price war weighed [Bloomberg]

Huawei isn’t public, but it still releases earnings figures: it says first-half net profit fell 36% to 23.81 billion yuan ($3.54 billion), as higher costs and R&D spending outweighed a 9.6% rise in revenue [Reuters]

AI and Chips

Manus has resumed independent operations more than four months after Beijing blocked its $2 billion acquisition by Meta with its original team in place. There’s no official confirmation of which investors were involved in the deal to release it from Meta. [Manus]

Semianalysis looks at how Korea’s trillion dollar efforts to develop sovereign AI have gone, concluding that Nvidia is winning [Semianalysis]

China’s CXMT has begun small-scale production of HBM3E, putting it one generation behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory for advanced AI chips [The Information]

Sony Semiconductor Solutions is working with Saudi Aramco on an AI model that uses image sensors to predict equipment failures at industrial plants [Nikkei Asia]

Japan’s Miyagi prefecture is trying to lure SK Hynix into building an advanced memory chip plant, although the company has denied reports that it is considering the site [Nikkei Asia]

Ajinomoto and Daikin Industries are expanding in Taiwan to work more closely with AI chip customers, as demand for advanced packaging and materials surges [Nikkei Asia]

Micron unions in Taiwan are moving toward possible strike action, demanding changes to the US chipmaker’s bonus system and a larger share of profits for workers [Reuters]

Policy

Big news here with Reuters reporting that India is preparing a framework that would let AI agents make small UPI payments without requiring approval for every transaction [Reuters]

South Korea proposed a record 821 trillion won ($596.92 billion) government budget for 2027, including a sharp push to strengthen its technology sector and compete in the global AI race [Reuters]

Singapore is committing to spend S$220 million ($173 million) over three years on fintech and innovation, including support for AI and at least 1,000 internships [Bloomberg]

India will offer chip-design startups up to 50% of project costs, capped at ₹150 million ($1.7 million), under its new Semicon 2.0 programme [Bloomberg]

A Chinese court has frozen up to 2.14 billion yuan ($300 million) of assets held by Dutch chipmaker Nexperia and its equipment arm [Reuters]

France will begin imposing a penalty on ultra-fast-fashion products this week, targeting platforms including Shein, Temu and AliExpress under a law aimed at reducing fashion waste [France24]

In other news:

China is rapidly electrifying its heavy-truck fleet, with new-energy models making up nearly 30% of sales last year, far ahead of Europe’s roughly 4% share [Semafor]

Apple could lift India’s share of global iPhone production to 30-35% within five years, supported by a new ₹62,500 crore ($7 billion) mobile manufacturing incentive package [Business Standard]

Prosus-backed iFood has asked Brazil’s antitrust regulator to investigate Meituan’s Keeta over allegedly unsustainably low prices [Bloomberg]

Chinese automakers are using AI to target 18-month development cycles, but the push is drawing tougher regulatory scrutiny over safety and testing as competition squeezes margins [Bloomberg]

Chinese rocket maker Galactic Energy successfully launched its Pallas-1 reusable rocket into orbit [SCMP]

Vietnamese automaker VinFast has reportedly suspended plans to manufacture three electric vehicles in India while it reassesses costs, telling suppliers to halt work on the VF3, VF6 and VF7 [Reuters]