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AI in ASIA
Saturday, 18 April 2026

3Before9

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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Recent Editions

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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.
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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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