Welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.
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.
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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.
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]
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