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AI in ASIA
Friday, 17 April 2026

3Before9

3 must-know AI stories before your 9am coffee

Who should pay attention

CIOs | CTOs | AI Developers | Policymakers | Regulators

What changes next

Debate is likely to intensify as countries refine their sovereign AI strategies and regulatory frameworks.

1

STT GDC and SuperX Open Singapore AI Innovation Centre with Free Two-Week Trials

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres and Nasdaq-listed SuperX AI Technology launched a dedicated AI Innovation Centre on Wednesday at STT's Singapore 5 facility in Tai Seng, giving enterprises free two-week access to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for pilots, proofs of concept and model benchmarking. The centre pairs STT GDC's AI-ready infrastructure with SuperX's orchestration software and is aimed at regional businesses with data residency requirements, independent software vendors and companies still stuck in the AI pilot stage. Trials can be extended by a week on request, and tenants can graduate into full production, hybrid or private deployments inside STT GDC's global footprint.

Why it matters for Asia

Singapore wants to be the place where Southeast Asian enterprises stop running AI experiments on foreign clouds and start running them on sovereign infrastructure, and this centre is the most concrete answer yet to PwC's finding that only 20 percent of companies capture the majority of AI's value. For CIOs and CTOs across ASEAN who are under board pressure to prove AI return on investment, a no-cost slot on Blackwell silicon inside a compliant Singapore facility removes the usual procurement and data-transfer excuses for staying in pilot purgatory.^

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2

SoftBank, Sony, Honda and NEC Launch Joint Firm to Build a Sovereign Japanese AI Model

SoftBank, Sony, Honda and NEC have formally established a new company, Japan AI Foundation Model Development, with each taking a stake of more than 10 percent and backed by up to one trillion yen of government support over five years from fiscal 2026. The venture is targeting a roughly one-trillion-parameter model trained on Japanese data and tuned for real-world physical control tasks, with Honda slated to deploy it first in autonomous vehicles and Sony applying it across robotics and gaming hardware. Nippon Steel, Kobe Steel and several major Japanese banks are in talks to come in as minority investors, signalling ambitions well beyond the tech sector.

Why it matters for Asia

Japan is pointedly refusing to rent its industrial AI stack from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, and the consortium structure means the country's biggest factories, carmakers and financiers will share one domestic foundation model rather than each buying in from abroad. For suppliers, robotics firms and enterprise software vendors across the region, this creates a new Japanese-controlled distribution channel for physical AI and adds a third serious pole to the US-China race that Asian buyers now have to plan around.^

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3

Huawei Cloud Rolls Out Token-Based Model Service Across Asia Pacific

Huawei Cloud used its AI Boost Day event in Jakarta on Tuesday to officially launch its Model-as-a-Service offering across the Asia Pacific region, letting enterprises pay by the token for access to six foundation models spanning the GLM, DeepSeek and Qwen families. The service runs on Huawei's in-house acceleration engine and is being positioned as a plug-and-play way for Southeast Asian firms to build agentic AI workloads without standing up their own GPU clusters. Huawei used the Jakarta stage to showcase customer deployments in banking, logistics and public services as proof that Chinese models are now enterprise-ready outside China.

Why it matters for Asia

Huawei is extending the Chinese AI stack into Southeast Asia on a pay-as-you-go basis, giving mid-market buyers in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines a lower-cost alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google at a moment when token pricing is becoming the primary axis of competition. Enterprises weighing sovereignty, cost and supply-chain risk now have a concrete regional option that keeps data and billing inside Asian jurisdictions, which will force hyperscalers to defend their pricing and partner margins across the region.^

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Recent Editions

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Thursday

16 April 2026

  • 1.The 2026 Stanford AI Index reveals China's AI model performance has nearly matched the US, with only a 2.7 per cent gap.
  • 2.SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda have formed a joint venture in Japan to develop a domestic physical AI foundation model.
  • 3.Southeast Asian nations, led by Singapore with a 61 per cent adoption rate, are showing strong optimism and uptake in AI.
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Tuesday

14 April 2026

  • 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.
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Monday

13 April 2026

  • 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.
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Sunday

12 April 2026

  • 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.
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Saturday

11 April 2026

  • 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.
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Thursday

9 April 2026

  • 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.
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