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Friday, 20 February 2026

3Before9

3 must-know AI stories before your 9am coffee

Who should pay attention

Investors | Tech companies | Governments | Business leaders

What changes next

Expect further AI infrastructure development and increasing AI integration across Asian industries.

1

Major tech investment pledges at India AI Impact Summit

At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, global and Indian companies announced large AI infrastructure and ecosystem investments, including commitments worth tens of billions of dollars in data centres, compute and AI platforms.

Why it matters for Asia

this level of investment signals confidence in India as a key node in the AI value chain and accelerates Asia’s capacity to build sovereign compute and infrastructure.

2

Google and Sea deepen AI partnership for e-commerce and gaming

Google and Southeast Asian tech group Sea Ltd have expanded their strategic collaboration to develop AI tools aimed at enhancing e-commerce, gaming and digital services, including agentic commerce prototypes and workflow solutions.

Why it matters for Asia

such partnerships leverage AI for product differentiation and digital inclusion across Southeast Asia’s leading consumer platforms.

3

CEOs report AI as disruptor and growth driver in Asia firms

A new survey of business leaders in Asia shows most executives expect AI to be a major factor in disruption and growth, with China seen as highly optimistic about AI’s potential while workforce impacts and governance remain top concerns.

Why it matters for Asia

executive expectations shape corporate strategy, hiring and capital allocation, and signal how Asia’s private sector is preparing for broad AI integration.

That's today's 3-Before-9.

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Recent Editions

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.

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.

Monday

20 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.

Saturday

18 April 2026

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.

Friday

17 April 2026

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.

Friday

17 April 2026

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.