Asia's Tech News, Weekly: April 12th 2025
Samsung 1nm chips, Japan stablecoin, Qualcomm-DeepRoute partners, TSMC's China chip fine, Cambodia joins payments group, Philippines-Malaysia-Japan instant payments, Huawei ternary logic chips...
• South Korea: Samsung has reportedly begun 1-nanometre chip process development, targeting 2029 for mass production, with 1.4nm development potentially being shelved / full item
• New Zealand and US state of Colorado ink cooperation agreement around aerospace, quantum and geothermal technologies / full item
• Japan: Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking is to issue the nation's first fiat-pegged stablecoin, with the company now making 'final adjustments' on the coin prior to rollout / full item
• Qualcomm, major US tech multinational, is partnering China's autonomous driving developer, DeepRouteAI, to develop advanced driver assistance solutions / full item
• China: Researchers publish study claiming chips breakthrough with 2D transistor said to be 40% faster than 3-nanometre chips from Intel and TSMC, while consuming 10% less energy / full item
"[Australian] Federal Arts Minister... told ABC Arts last week that there was nothing the Australian government could currently do to prevent unlicensed use of creatives' work to train AI models..." / full item
• Alibaba Cloud Malaysia AI Hackathon registrations close April 30th - details here / full item
• Australian Securities and Investments Commission has cancelled the licenses of 95 companies, many of them suspected of having links to online scams / full item
• Malaysia: MYStartup NXT Cyberjaya is set for April 22nd, a day for founders, investors, and ecosystem builders, running with the theme 'Malaysia Builds Startups, Startups Build Malaysia' / full item
• National Bank of Cambodia has formally joined the Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, marking a further step towards financial integration in Southeast Asia / full item
• Taiwan's TSMC may face penalty of $1BN or more to settle US export control investigation over TSMC chips found in Huawei AI processors, sourced by China's Sophgo / full item
Video: 60/40 Episode 3, from Tech in Asia, looking at startups and VCs in the age of AI, 'Liberation Day' in Asia, Grab-GoTo rumors, and more / on YouTube
• The Philippines is working with Malaysia and Japan to link their instant payment systems for merchants, with sights on graduating from bilateral ties to a multilateral approach / full item
• Malaysia's Bank Negara and Bank of Thailand ink MoU to cooperate on cybersecurity and digital fraud prevention / full item
• 'China's mega-constellation launches could litter orbit for more than a century, analysts warn' / full item
• Western Australia's first grid-connected hybrid solar-battery site now online, aiming to deliver 4 hours of daily supply at peak demand / full item
• Bangladesh startup ecosystem: "...more than 1,200 active startups... collectively raised nearly $1 billion in funding, with 76% of that coming from venture capital..." / full item
"Security researchers have uncovered a pre-installed, undocumented remote access tunnel in Unitree Go1 robot dogs, enabling full remote control and potential lateral network access. / full item
• China: Huawei patents 'ternary logic' chips, looking at potential to reduce the number of transistors on a chip, reducing energy consumption / full item
• Bank Negara Malaysia and National Bank of Cambodia launch Phase 2 of cross-border QR payment link, enabling instant payments within each country's own QR and banking system / full item
• Vietnam's FOMO Pay adds Vietnamese local-currency virtual accounts, enabling cross-border collection and payments in Vietnam, building on UAE Dirham capabilities / full item
• TSMC's 2nm chips are projected to outclass 3nm chips with 10%-15% boost in computing speed at the same power level, or 20-30% reduction in power usage at the same speed / full item
• Australia: Flagship raises Au$6M with digital visual merchandising platform, giving physical stores real-time data spanning inventory levels, product views and conversion rates / full item
• China: Companies including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent placed at least $16BN in orders for China-market NVIDIA H20 server chips in Q1 2025, in part driven by DeepSeek competition / full item
• Japan: Lifehub Inc is to unveil all-terrain electric wheelchair in 2026 that allows users to climb and descend stairs, and board trains and buses without assistance / full item
• China: Some companies selling on Amazon are reportedly preparing to lift prices for the US, or quit the US market, due to tariff hikes, says Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Ass'n / full item
• Australian SME cyber risk: "SMEs, particularly in the hospitality, retail, and service sectors, frequently depend on cloud platforms, emails, and POS systems that utilise public networks..." / full item
• Intel and TSMC are reportedly looking at a joint venture in which TSMC would acquire 20% of Intel foundry business, with TSMC transferring key knowledge to Intel / full item
China's semiconductor industry: "...nearly 100 financing events have taken place... over the past two months, with nearly 30 of them reaching the billion-yuan level..." / full item
• Australia: Prime Minister allocates Au$2.3 billion to lowering the price of home battery systems ahead of May 3 election / full item
• Philippines: Now Telecom has less than 2 weeks to save its mobile business after having licence stripped by Nat'l Telecommunications Commission over missed rollout targets, and debts / full item
• Australia: An intro to Teer, a media aggregation service streamlining the process of identifying and executing media opportunities for agencies and creative suppliers / full item
• Philippines: Crypto Vision 2025 Conference is set for April 26th in Makati, looking at subjects including DeFi, NFTs, and the future of digital finance / full item
• Australia's Vow, producing cultured quail, gains regulatory approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand, opening the door to cultured meat in New Zealand / full item
In wider-world technology news:
» Semiconductor startup funding in Q1 2025: "The first quarter of 2025 saw six companies raise at least $100 million in investment. Of those, three went to quantum hardware companies..." / full item
» Meet the clip-on SunBooster, using near-infrared LEDs to bring the benefits of sunlight indoors, attaching to computer monitors and laptops / full item
» 'Social Security Website Crashes as DOGE-Linked Disruption at the Agency Continues' / full item
» The 2025 AI Index Report is now available, from Stanford University: "In 2023, the [US] FDA approved 223 AI-enabled medical devices..." / full item
» 'Can Bluesky's AT Protocol build the decentralized social media ecosystem the Fediverse aspires to?' / full item
» Meta plans to spend near $1 billion on data center project in Wisconsin, part of a larger effort to boost investments in AI and cloud infrastructure / full item
» IBM has launched a new mainframe system that allows some data to remain purely on in-house, customer-owned servers, without transfer to cloud systems / full item
» Crusoe Energy, the company building the first phase of the $500 billion Project Stargate, set to be the world's biggest AI datacentre, for OpenAI and Oracle / full item
Space is becoming ever more central to human communications... But how secure are these satellite connections, really?' / full item
More of Asia & the Indo-Pacific:
• LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook / Web / Connect
• Indo-Pacific Insight, Daily: Small-picture Ind-Pacific geopolitics & geoeconomics
• Indo-Pacific Insight, Weekly: A weekly overview of the region’s developments
And here's the link to the April 12th edition of Asia's Tech News, Weekly published over on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/asias-tech-news-weekly-april-12th-2025-startup-news-asia-2wupc/