3 Before 9: April 18, 2026

1. TSMC Raises 2026 Forecast As AI Chip Demand Keeps Smashing Records

TSMC lifted its full-year revenue forecast on Thursday and pledged more capital spending, after first-quarter profit jumped 58 percent to a record T$572.5 billion (US$18.2 billion), its eighth straight quarter of double-digit growth. The world's largest contract chipmaker, which supplies Nvidia, said advanced 3-nanometre chips now account for a quarter of sales, up from 6 percent in late 2023. CEO C.C. Wei told analysts "AI-related demand continues to be extremely robust" and warned that production capacity remains tight.

Why it matters: TSMC's results are the clearest signal yet that the AI buildout is not slowing, and Taiwan sits at the centre of it. With TSMC's market cap now nearly double Samsung's at roughly US$1.7 trillion, Asian foundry capacity has become the hard constraint on every enterprise AI roadmap, from cloud providers in Singapore to sovereign AI projects in India and Indonesia. Expect longer lead times and higher prices for any customer not already at the front of the queue.

2. Stanford Index Says China Has Effectively Erased The US AI Lead

Stanford's HAI 2026 AI Index, released this week, found that the top Chinese model, ByteDance's Dola-Seed 2.0, now trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 by just 39 Elo points, a 2.7 percent gap in Arena scores. Back in May 2023, OpenAI's GPT-4 led Chinese models by more than 300 points. The report also notes China now accounts for 20.6 percent of global AI citations versus 12.6 percent for the US, and leads on patents, publications and robot deployment. The US still holds an edge in sheer number of frontier models, with 50 to China's 30.

Why it matters: For enterprise buyers in Asia, the "use American models by default" assumption is dead. Chinese models from ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek are now within a rounding error on capability, cost a fraction of frontier US models and run on domestic chips that sidestep US export controls. Procurement teams in Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila are already running bake-offs, and CIOs who refuse to pilot Chinese models risk handing competitors a cost advantage.

3. Hangzhou's Manycore Soars 144 Percent In Hong Kong AI IPO Debut

Manycore Tech, one of Hangzhou's celebrated six "Little Dragons" alongside DeepSeek and Unitree, closed its first trading day on the Hong Kong exchange at HK$18.60, 144 percent above the HK$7.62 offer price, after raising up to HK$1.02 billion. The company pitches "spatial intelligence" as the next wave of AI, building 3D design and scene-understanding models aimed at property, retail and manufacturing use cases. It is the first of the six Hangzhou startups to reach public markets.

Why it matters: The debut reopens a narrative that had gone quiet since the DeepSeek moment, that Hangzhou's cluster of AI startups can produce commercially viable public companies, not just research demos. For buyers in Southeast Asia running retail or real-estate workflows, spatial AI is moving from novelty to a vendor-selection question within 12 months. Expect Manycore's rivals to accelerate their own Hong Kong listings, and expect Middle Eastern and ASEAN sovereign funds to come shopping.