AI in Asia
Saturday, 18 April 2026

3 Before 9

3 must-know AI stories before your 9am coffee

Who should pay attention

Chip manufacturers | AI developers | Gaming studios | Cloud providers | Consumers

What changes next

Competition in AI chip production and advanced AI models is set to intensify.

1

TSMC Q1 Profit Surges 58% as AI Chip Demand Breaks Records

TSMC reported first-quarter net profit of NT$572.48 billion on Thursday, a 58% year-on-year jump that beat analyst estimates and marked the Taiwanese chipmaker's fourth consecutive quarter of record earnings. Advanced nodes accounted for roughly 75% of wafer revenue, with the high-performance computing division covering AI and 5G rising to 61% of total sales. Chief executive CC Wei raised full-year 2026 revenue growth guidance to more than 30% in US dollar terms and guided second-quarter revenue to between $39 billion and $40.2 billion. TSMC also flagged new 3nm lines in Tainan, a second Arizona fab and a 3nm-capable plant in Kumamoto, Japan.

Why it matters for Asia

TSMC's numbers are the clearest read on whether the AI capital cycle is still running hot, and the answer is yes, with customers including Nvidia booking every wafer the company can make. For Asian enterprise buyers, the capacity squeeze means another year of tight allocation on advanced silicon and premium pricing on AI-grade servers, while the geographic spread across Taiwan, Arizona and Japan signals where governments expect the next waves of AI manufacturing investment to land.^

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2

Alibaba Takes Aim at Tencent's Gaming Turf With Happy Oyster World Model

Alibaba released Happy Oyster, an AI world model that generates interactive 3D environments in real time, aimed at film, gaming and VR concept work. Unlike standard text-to-video systems, Happy Oyster keeps scenes consistent while users change characters, lighting or camera angles on the fly, and its Wandering mode lets viewers walk through an expanding first-person world from a single prompt. The product sits inside Token Hub, the same Alibaba Cloud unit behind the Happy Horse video model, and is being pitched to developers as a controllable creative layer for rapid prototyping. Early access is live via waitlist, with sessions currently capped at one to three minutes at 480p or 720p output.

Why it matters for Asia

Gaming is Tencent's home turf, so Alibaba pushing a world model at game studios is a direct commercial challenge from the cloud side of Hangzhou. For studios across Southeast Asia and Korea that already run on Alibaba Cloud or are weighing it against Tencent Cloud, this turns AI tooling into a sticky lock-in play rather than a neutral productivity boost, and it accelerates the timeline on which regional publishers will need to pick sides in China's escalating AI platform war.^

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3

South Korea's Lee Lands in Delhi With AI and Defence on the Summit Agenda

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung arrives in New Delhi on Sunday for a state visit, his first to India and the first by a Korean leader in eight years. He meets prime minister Narendra Modi on Monday for a summit covering shipbuilding co-production, artificial intelligence, defence manufacturing and small modular reactors, alongside a target of $50 billion in bilateral trade by 2030. Lee travels with the first lady and a delegation of ministers, senior officials and business leaders, and the two governments are expected to sign agreements across the priority sectors. The visit comes as both countries work to de-risk supply chains exposed by Middle East tensions and the recent Hormuz Shock.

Why it matters for Asia

India and South Korea are the two largest democracies in Asia with serious AI ambitions outside the US-China axis, and a formal technology pact between them reshapes the regional alignment picture. For enterprise buyers and policymakers across Asia-Pacific, watch for agreements on sovereign AI infrastructure, chip co-investment and defence-grade compute. This is where the third pole narrative moves from talking point to industrial policy, and it signals where Korean and Indian vendors will compete against Chinese and American offerings over the next five years.^

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That's today's 3 Before 9.

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Friday

24 April 2026

  • 1. DeepSeek launches V4-Pro and V4-Flash with a 1-million-token context window, running on Huawei's new Ascend 950 supernode clusters and priced at roughly a tenth of OpenAI's output-token rate.
  • 2. SoftBank is seeking a $10 billion two-year margin loan collateralised by its OpenAI stake, pushing its total commitment to the ChatGPT maker to about $64.6 billion.
  • 3. TSMC unveiled A13, a 1.3nm-class shrink of A14 aimed at AI accelerators, with production slated for 2029 alongside a 1.2nm A12 variant, while A16 slips to 2027.
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Thursday

23 April 2026

  • 1. Microsoft pledges A$25 billion (US$17.9 billion) to make Australia its largest AI infrastructure hub, including skills training for three million workers.
  • 2. SK Hynix posts a record 72 per cent operating margin and US$27 billion quarterly profit as HBM demand keeps Asia's memory duopoly in the driver's seat.
  • 3. Japan's Nikkei 225 breaches 60,000 for the first time, but only 17 per cent of Tokyo stocks rose on the day, exposing a dangerously narrow AI-driven rally.
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Wednesday

22 April 2026

  • 1. LINE Yahoo launched Agent i on 20 April, a single AI agent now embedded in both the LINE app's 100m-plus user base and Yahoo! JAPAN, with enterprise and no-code versions due over the summer.
  • 2. SoftBank named Arm CEO Rene Haas to also run SoftBank Group International from 21 April, tightening coordination across the group's overseas chip and AI bets including Arm, OpenAI, Stargate and Project Crystal Land.
  • 3. Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Singapore-based Chinese AI start-up Manus is still under Beijing's national-security review, with co-founders barred from leaving China and the 'Singapore washing' route for China AI firms now under serious pressure.
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Tuesday

21 April 2026

  • 1. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon met Samsung and SK Hynix executives in Seoul to pitch 2nm wafer orders and lock in memory supply for Snapdragon and AI platforms.
  • 2. Chinese humanoid robot makers shipped roughly 90 per cent of global units in 2025 but still trade at a valuation discount to pre-production US rivals.
  • 3. Volkswagen confirmed its China cars will ship with an on-device AI voice agent from H2 2026, built on tech from Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.
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Monday

20 April 2026

  • 1. SK Hynix has begun mass production of its 192GB SOCAMM2 memory module, a low-power AI server part for Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform.
  • 2. Alibaba launched Qwen3.6-Max-Preview, its strongest Qwen model to date, demonstrating top performance in several coding benchmarks.
  • 3. TSMC raised its 2026 outlook after Q1 profit jumped 58 per cent, citing "extremely robust" AI chip demand that still outpaces supply.
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Sunday

19 April 2026

  • 1. PwC's 2026 AI study finds 74% of AI's economic value is captured by just 20% of companies, with Singapore firms showing the highest risk appetite globally for AI investment.
  • 2. Google DeepMind released Gemma 4, a family of open-source models under Apache 2.0 that runs on a single GPU and ranks third on the Arena AI leaderboard.
  • 3. Southeast Asia leads the world in AI optimism with 80%+ of respondents expecting AI to transform their lives, but governance frameworks across the region remain largely voluntary.
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