AI
AI Middleware Promises Flexibility. In Asia, It Can Create Jurisdictional Lock-In
Asian enterprises are buying AI middleware to reduce model lock-in. But in regional deployments, that flexibility can create a harder dependency: jurisdictional control.
The West Is Pulling Back on Tokenmaxxing. China Is Making It An Economic Signal
China is in the process of turning token consumption into an economic signal. In the West, the companies that followed “tokenmaxxing”—the practice of maximizing token consumption—are now pulling back. Leaderboards are coming down, licenses are being cancelled, and the metric is being publicly abandoned. For operators in Asia, that juxt…
Before AI Can Work, Southeast Asia’s Enterprises Need To Fix Their Data
Companies across Southeast Asia are approving AI pilots before answering a more basic question: can the underlying workflow actually support automation at scale?
China's OpenClaw Wave: Signal or Noise?
On the morning of March 6, Tencent’s cloud engineers set up free installation booths outside their Shenzhen headquarters for OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that can autonomously run tasks on a computer. Students stood alongside retired engineers. Someone had flown in from Hangzhou. Meanwhile, across the city,
Two AI Phones. Two Access Models. One Critical Difference.
Two models are emerging in the race to build “AI phones.”
Vietnam’s New AI Law: The Road Ahead For Businesses
A chatbot flow gets updated. A vendor proposes a “slightly better” model. A team automates a step in approvals.
The Chinese New Year AI Gateway War: The Big Four’s Fight for Daily Habit
For China’s tech giants, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala is a once-a-year distribution super node. It is the closest thing China has to the Super Bowl, and the sponsorship optics carry institutional weight in a system where industrial priorities are set from the top. The Gala made that subtext visible. Humanoid robots were not a side act. It signaled what…
Agentic AI Can Act. Singapore’s New Rulebook Says: Prove You Can Stop It.
Agentic AI, advanced autonomous systems that can act without human supervision, is becoming more common and sophisticated.
India’s AI Push Is Real. Production Access Is the Constraint
The global AI race is often framed as a US–China contest. India’s play is different. It is trying to become a reliable node in the AI supply chain—an inference and deployment base, not just a consumer of frontier models. One signal is AI for India 2030, a World Economic Forum initiative aimed at aligning government, industry, and start…
What Tencent’s ‘Yuanbao PAI’ Reveals About Its AI Strategy
China’s consumer AI race is moving into its most visible battleground of the year. Chinese New Year is no longer just a holiday window, it is a live-fire test for the biggest platforms to prove product strength in front of a mass audience, and to do something less glamorous but just as important: teach users what these tools are for. DeepSeek’s breakout…
Indonesia Is Racing To Regulate AI. The Messy Part Is Implementation
Indonesia is racing to publish its national AI rulebook while courting global cloud and compute players. For senior operators, that creates an immediate decision problem: should we scale AI deployment in Indonesia this year, or wait until enforcement is clearer?
At WAIC Hong Kong, the AI Conversation Has Moved Past the Model Race
Editor’s Note: Asia Tech Lens’ editor-in-chief Miro Lu attended the 2026 WAIC UP! Global Summit in Hong Kong on 16th January 2026, where a recurring theme in panels and side discussions was that the “first wave” of generative AI is giving way to a more operational phase defined by distribution, monetization, and platform strategy.
Why ByteDance’s AI Phone Hit a Wall: Security, Fair Play, and the Economics of Attention
A phone that can “do things for you” sounds like convenience. It also sounds, to many apps, like a bot with a user’s keys.
Asia’s Agentic Moment: The Manus Interview That Preceded Meta’s Billion-Dollar Move
Editor’s Note: This article is based on a Chinese-language interview with Yichao “Peak” Ji, co-founder and chief scientist of Manus, recorded on the 張小珺 Xiaojùn Podcast on December 1, 2025, before Meta’s deal with Manus became public. The deal has since come under regulatory scrutiny in China, with reports indicating that aut…
AI Is Accelerating Cybercrime—And Southeast Asia Is Where The Damage Shows Up
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping cybersecurity by compressing response time. It helps organizations sift through enormous volumes of signals and automate parts of defense, but it also gives attackers shortcuts, making it easier to craft convincing scams, probe systems at speed, and scale attacks with far less expertise than bef…
How AI Is Remaking K-Entertainment
On November 21 & 22, 2025, a “virtual” boy band pulled off the unthinkable: selling out Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome, K-pop’s arena pinnacle, for two nights straight. PLAVE drew 37,000 screaming fans, proving that pixels can pack arenas just like BTS.
Can India Build Quantum Computers That Matter Globally?
Quantum computing is a long-horizon, capital-intensive, physics-constrained race already being dominated by the hyperscalers—the likes of Google, IBM, and Microsoft. India is betting on a fledgling startup and a new ecosystem that is still underway. The ambition is real, but whether the country can escape catch-up mode is less clear.
Emerging Voices: The Security-Trained Founder Rebuilding Workflows for the Agent Era
Southeast Asia’s enterprises talk confidently about transformation, automation, and AI. But the moment a workflow moves from “assist” to “act” the enthusiasm slows. While agentic systems sound visionary in boardrooms, in practice they collide with long-standing habits and ways of doing business. Who signs off? Who supervises autonomy? Where is the data …
When Frontier AI Emerges from Outside Silicon Valley
Frontier AI used to be bound by geography and compute. Tokyo-based Sakana AI is challenging both.
AI for Global Equity Begins With Local Realities
Backed by new capital, global tech expansion, and growing government interest, artificial intelligence is advancing across Southeast Asia at a pace that is both exciting and uneven. The region’s adoption c…
A Quiet Alliance: The Hidden Layer Powering AI Adoption in Asia
AI adoption is often described in terms of chips, data centers, and model breakthroughs. But for most businesses in Asia, the decisive factor is something far less glamorous: the partners who translate global AI platforms into real deployments.
Superhexa’s Hardware-First Bet: Why China’s AI Glasses Race Might Be Backwards
China is in a full-blown rush to build the “next big thing” in AI hardware. More than a hundred companies—from Shenzhen gadget shops to billion-dollar manufacturers—are racing to launch AI glasses, AI pins, and every imaginable hands-free form factor.
When AI Speaks Your Language
Lost in the 250-million-strong tide at India’s Maha Kumbh? A Bhashini chatbot can now guide you to the nearest ghats, in Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali. Selling fried snacks on a street in Indonesia? GoPay’s voice assistant understands you perfectly.
Singapore’s Quantum Bet: Where AI Meets the Next Compute Revolution
News broke in September: Horizon Quantum Computing, a homegrown startup that turns classical code into quantum logic, plans a US$500 million SPAC. It signaled a bigger bet for Singapore — one that unites deep-tech ambition with national strategy.
Virtual Partners, Real Markets: The Rise of AI Companions in Asia
In Hangzhou, 28-year-old Xiao Gao wept over the loss of her AI boyfriend, calling herself a “cyberspace widow.” In Beijing, Liu Xue threw a drone-lit birthday party for Rafayel, her virtual lover from the hit game ‘Love and Deepspace’.
Ropet: The AI Pet Startup Redefining Companionship
Inside the vision of a startup that sees comfort not in talking robots, but in AI pets that feel alive and need your care
The AI Battleground: How Southeast Asia Is Forging a New Path Between Open and Closed Models
As artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) break into the mainstream, the global debate over open versus closed AI is intensifying.
Meet MiniMax: The Chinese Tech Company Touted by Jensen Huang That’s Headed for an IPO
Earlier this month, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spotlighted China’s generative AI leaders - naming players like DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, MiniMax, and miHoYo among the country’s world-class innovators. He was speaking at the third China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing.
This 3rd-Gen Kuok Is Transforming the Family Empire With a $10B AI Bet
Kuok Meng Wei, a Stanford-educated engineer and grandson of Malaysia’s richest man, is betting big on Southeast Asia’s digital future by building data centers in Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond.
A Traditional Journalist, Some AI Tools, and the Future of Storytelling
A lot of you may not know this, but several of the team members behind Asia Tech Lens are actually traditional, mainstream broadcast journalists and producers. Folks who have spent decades in fast-paced newsrooms, chasing breaking news, reporting from the ground, and figuring out how to tell complex stories in under three …
Super AI Singapore: Through Our Eyes
Asia Tech Lens was on the ground this week at Marina Bay Sands for Super AI Singapore 2025, an event that pulled in over 7,000 attendees from more than 100 countries. While we knew it was going to be a well-attended event, the enormity only hit us when we arrived on site. What struck us most was the diversity of who showed up. You had the …
The AI Agent Era Has Begun, and Privacy Risks Are Rising
While generative AI like ChatGPT and DeepSeek has dominated headlines, a quieter revolution is gaining momentum: agentic AI. These tools don’t just chat or create — they act. They can make decisions and carry out tasks for you, and they’re starting to become part of daily life.
Plush, Playful, and Powered by AI: How China’s Toys are Evolving
What if your favorite toy could talk back, tell you stories or even help with your studies?
Alibaba's open source Qwen 3 redefines global access with 119 languages, beating ChatGPT and Gemini
The world has already witnessed China's "DeepSeek moment," a significant marker of its rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and the wave of innovation continues to surge.
Indonesia’s cloud and AI market is up for grabs, and Big Tech smells opportunity
Southeast Asia is in the midst of an AI gold rush, and Indonesia—the region’s largest market and the world’s fourth most populous nation—is right at the center of the action. Global tech giants like the Magnificent Seven, Chinese titans, and ambitious regional players are all investing hundreds of millions of dollars on the country’s …