1.TSMC reported a 58% increase in Q1 net profit, driven by record demand for AI chips and advanced node sales, leading to higher full-year revenue guidance and global expansion.
2.Alibaba introduced "Happy Oyster", an AI world model that generates consistent, interactive 3D environments in real time, aiming to challenge Tencent in film, gaming, and VR applications.
3.South Korean president Lee Jae Myung arrives in New Delhi for a state visit, with a Monday summit set to cover AI, shipbuilding, defence and small modular reactors alongside a $50 billion bilateral trade target.
1.TSMC reported record profits and increased its revenue forecast for 2026, driven by extremely robust demand for advanced AI chips, with production capacity remaining tight.
2.Stanford's 2026 AI Index reveals China has significantly narrowed the AI model performance gap with the US and now leads in several key AI metrics like citations and patents.
3.Manycore Tech soared 144% on its Hong Kong debut, signalling investor appetite for Hangzhou's spatial-intelligence AI startups and opening the door for more IPOs from the "Little Dragons" cluster.
1.STT GDC and SuperX opened an AI Innovation Centre in Singapore, offering free two-week trials of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for regional enterprises to develop AI solutions.
2.SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and NEC formed a new company with government backing to develop a sovereign Japanese AI model, targeting a one-trillion-parameter LLM.
3.Huawei Cloud officially launched its Model-as-a-Service offering across Asia Pacific at Jakarta's AI Boost Day, giving enterprises pay-by-the-token access to GLM, DeepSeek and Qwen models.
1.Japan's major technology companies, including SoftBank, Honda, Sony, and NEC, have launched a joint venture to build a trillion-parameter AI for autonomous machines, ensuring all data remains within Japan.
2.Chinese embodied AI startup Spirit AI secured $420 million from prominent investors, including Lei Jun and Jack Ma, to develop humanoid robots and general-purpose robotics.
3.These investments signify a strategic pivot in Asian AI, with Japan prioritising data sovereignty for physical AI and China focusing on hardware and real-world embodied intelligence.
1.Japan committed an additional $4 billion in subsidies to Rapidus, bringing total public backing to $16.3 billion to establish a domestic 2nm chip foundry.
2.The Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index reports the performance gap between top US and Chinese frontier AI models has narrowed to just 2.7 percent.
3.Hong Kong opens the 2026 World Internet Conference Asia-Pacific Summit with six AI governance sub-forums spanning agents, security, finance and health.
1.UK regulators including the Bank of England are urgently convening with financial firms to assess cybersecurity risks from Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities faster than human experts.
2.Grab unveiled 13 AI-powered features at GrabX 2026, building an Intelligence Layer on 20 billion rides and orders to serve as Southeast Asia's first AI-native superapp.
3.India's Sarvam AI is closing a $350 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation, the largest ever for a pure-play Indian AI company, with backing from Nvidia, Amazon and Bessemer.
1.TSMC reported a record Q1 revenue increase of 35 per cent to NT$1.13 trillion, primarily driven by strong demand for advanced AI chips.
2.OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are collaborating through the Frontier Model Forum to counter unauthorised AI model copying from Chinese firms.
3.Digital Realty is committing nearly S$7 billion to expand data centre capacity in Singapore, reinforcing the city-state as Asia-Pacific's critical AI infrastructure hub.
1.OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are collaboratively sharing threat intelligence via the Frontier Model Forum to counter adversarial distillation by Chinese AI firms.
2.This coordinated defence operation targets firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, potentially impacting enterprise buyers in Southeast Asia and informing AI governance frameworks in the region.
3.Meta has launched Muse Spark, a closed-source multimodal model from its Superintelligence Labs, featuring a "Contemplating" mode for complex reasoning.
1.GITEX AI Asia, the region's largest technology conference, opened in Singapore, attracting significant investment and showcasing the city-state's role as a deep tech hub.
2.The World Bank revised East Asia's 2026 growth forecast downwards to 4.2%, while identifying AI-related exports and investment as a regional economic strength.
3.Microsoft committed $10 billion to Japan's AI infrastructure from 2026 to 2029, partnering with Sakura Internet and SoftBank to address the country's projected shortfall of 3.26 million AI workers by 2040.
1.Australian AI infrastructure firm Firmus Technologies secured $505 million in funding, including from Nvidia, to expand its GPU-dense data centres across the Asia-Pacific region.
2.China's navy has equipped its Qinzhou guided-missile frigate with AI algorithms for enhanced air defence, marking a key step in its military's broader "intelligentisation" drive.
3.Microsoft has committed $6.5 billion to AI and cloud infrastructure across Southeast Asia, with $5.5 billion for Singapore and over $1 billion for Thailand, positioning the region as a global AI compute hub.
1.South Korea's March exports hit a record $86.13 billion, with semiconductor shipments surging 151% to $32.84 billion on soaring AI data centre demand.
2.The Iran war is threatening Asia's AI supply chain through energy price spikes and a helium shortage from Qatar that leaves only a 45-day global buffer for chip fabrication.
3.Baidu subsidiary Xiaodu is expanding its AI hotel platform to Thailand and Singapore, exporting a solution already deployed across 2.6 million rooms in China.
1.Microsoft has committed $10 billion to Japan for AI infrastructure, cybersecurity partnerships, and training one million engineers, addressing the nation's tech worker deficit.
2.Alibaba launched its Qwen 3.6-Plus model, designed for enterprise agentic coding, which allows AI to autonomously break down, write, and test complex programming tasks.
3.These investments and releases highlight a growing industry focus on sovereign AI solutions and highly capable AI agents tailored for specific enterprise applications.
1.Microsoft will invest $10 billion in Japan by 2029 to boost AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and train one million engineers, partnering with local firms like Sakura Internet.
2.Microsoft also pledged $5.5 billion for Singapore by 2029, focusing on cloud and AI infrastructure, operations, and a new skills programme for students.
3.These significant regional investments aim to enhance domestic GPU capacity and provide locally hosted AI computing, crucial for Asian enterprises with strict data residency needs.
1.Broadcom warns TSMC has hit AI chip capacity limits, with demand three times above supply and constraints expected to last into 2027.
2.DJI spin-off ZYT says its autonomous driving AI outperforms its own CEO on Shenzhen streets, with truck mass production starting this year and a Hong Kong IPO targeted for 2027.
3.AI EXPO Taiwan 2026 opens today at Taipei Expo Park with AWS, Nvidia, Microsoft, and every major cloud provider exhibiting across three themed zones.
1.Alibaba launches Accio Work, a no-code AI agent platform that assembles specialist teams to run sourcing, compliance and marketing for SMEs across 100+ markets.
2.Tencent doubles its AI product budget to 36 billion yuan for 2026, confirms Hunyuan 3.0 and a WeChat AI agent are on the way.
3.WHO and ADB convene 16 developing Asian nations in Manila to build shared AI-in-health frameworks, governance standards and a regional data-sharing pilot.
1.Deloitte reports 41% of companies expect physical AI to transform their industries within three years, yet just 3% have extensively integrated it today.
2.Micron completed a $1.8 billion acquisition of a Taiwan DRAM factory to boost HBM production for AI workloads, reporting earnings today with $19.2 billion expected revenue.
3.Alibaba DAMO Academy published a Nature Communications paper on MAOSS, an AI model that detects fatty liver disease from routine CT scans, having screened 50 million patients across 10 countries.
1.Nvidia introduced its Feynman AI chip architecture, set for 2028, and confirmed Vera Rubin platform samples are now shipping to customers.
2.Feynman will utilise TSMC's 1.6nm A16 process, signifying Nvidia's first use of a sub-2nm node and increased reliance on Taiwan's chip manufacturing.
3.Alibaba is preparing to launch an enterprise AI agent based on its Qwen foundation model, offering autonomous assistants for businesses via its DingTalk platform.
1.Nvidia will unveil its new Vera Rubin platform GPU, featuring up to 288GB of HBM4 memory, at the GTC conference, signifying advancements in AI chip technology.
2.Korean memory makers SK hynix and Samsung are central to the AI hardware race, as they are the sole producers of HBM4 at scale, granting them significant influence.
3.Chinese tech giants Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have launched consumer-focused mobile apps utilising OpenClaw, an open-source agentic AI framework, for automating daily tasks.
1.Google concluded its $32 billion acquisition of cloud security firm Wiz, marking its largest purchase ever.
2.Wiz will operate under Google Cloud, retaining its brand and providing multicloud protection across various providers, including AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
3.The acquisition's final regulatory approvals came from Singapore and Japan, highlighting increased scrutiny of tech consolidations in the APAC region.
