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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

Enterprise AI buyers | AI developers | Policymakers | Regulators | Tech investors

What changes next

Expect longer lead times for AI chips and intensified global debate on AI regulation and national competitiveness.

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 for Asia

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.^

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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 Asia

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.^

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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 for Asia

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.^

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Recent Editions

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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.
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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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